Over the last decade or so, Leonardo DiCaprio has flourished spectacularly as a performer. Rebounding from early roles that tried positioning him as a major movie star before he had the requisite expertise to be one, he’s emerged in recent years as a purveyor of flawed, sometimes disturbed antiheroes (and a bloodthirsty black hole of a villain in Django Unchained). It’s a run of performances spawned from his working relationship with Martin Scorsese, however, that his progress as an actor can best be charted.
From solid (if dodgily-accented) in Gangs of New York, to nuanced in The Aviator, to convincingly fragile and conflicted in The Departed and on to – if critics are to be believed – his best performance yet in The Wolf of Wall Street, DiCaprio wouldn’t be the actor he is today without the continued faith of Martin Scorsese. But we can also thank the legendary filmmaker for Shutter Island, which seemed to have a rejuvenating influence on DiCaprio as an actor of craft and intelligence in another big-budget 2010 movie about the intricacies of the human mind, Christopher Nolan’s Inception.
Where Inception is an elephantine sci-fi actioner almost operatic in its execution, Shutter Island is a relatively small-scale, pulpy noir thriller. Inception follows Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), a thief who breaks into human minds to extract information and is suddenly faced with the proposition of planting an idea in the head of an energy corporation heir. In Shutter Island, DiCaprio plays Teddy Daniels, a U.S. Marshal investigating a remote psychiatric facility after the disappearance of an inmate. There’s thematic fabric shared by both: haunted by the deaths of their respective wives, for which they’re each in some way culpable, Cobb and Teddy make for untrustworthy narrators of their own stories, impacting both films in similarly intriguing ways.
Both Shutter Island and Inception feign objectivity. A lot of what we see in the former is eventually revealed to be “reality” refracted through Teddy’s psychosis, while much (perhaps all, depending on your interpretation) of the latter literally takes place within Cobb’s mind. But clearly-signposted dream sequences in each film make small inconsistencies when we’re situated back in ‘reality’ harder to spot. At one point in Shutter Island, a psychiatric patient being interrogated by Teddy picks up a glass of water, only to be seen gulping at air in the next shot. In Inception, a flashback to the suicide of Cobb’s wife in their anniversary hotel suite has her leap from the ledge of the opposite building. These two rather unsuspecting logical blips, and many other initially unnoticeable inconsistencies in both films, are pop-shots at the viewer’s subconscious.
Inception and Shutter Island trick the audience not just into empathizing with near-impenetrable characters, but into quietly questioning the nature of reality. Inception suggests our entire world could just be the product of a lonely individual dream, while Shutter Island even less cozily posits the idea that our reality could be spiked by unwilling madness. And much like Kubrick wielded impossible architecture in The Shining, both films use viewers’ expectations of cinema to instill a sense of unease. Our suspension of disbelief relies on the comfortable idea that cinema is supposed to aid us with definition, to confirm to us what’s real and what isn’t, yet Inception doesn’t explain how Cobb’s ‘forger’ Eames (Tom Hardy) can conjure betting chips out of fresh air in a Tangiers casino, and Shutter Island won’t let on how Rachel Solando (Patricia Clarkson) has been surviving out in a cliff face during a series of vicious storms.
Lulled back into a sense of relative normality after Inception‘s calculated dreams and Shutter Island‘s bizarre nightmares, both their “real” worlds appear recognizable and unassuming enough for the directors to insert inconsistencies without us even noticing. Perversely, dream sequences in Inception and Shutter Island are more efficient at helping the audience understand the protagonists than those scenes the directors have marked as “reality.” The approach transforms the films into games in which the viewer is encouraged to uncover the relevance of straight clues amid wild symbolism, using dreams as a means for the audience to take a crack at solving the puzzle of the lead character.
Inception and Shutter Island are linked beyond the obvious. They both feature exceptional performances by DiCaprio in a diptych of roles that tragically deconstruct the myth of the invincible all-American hero by using the mind as the character’s own internal antagonist. One wonders why DiCaprio would choose to play two characters so similarly afflicted, but the testament to the man’s skill now as an actor is how distinct Cobb and Teddy feel. The contradictory Cobb lives under a veneer of false cool, whereas Teddy, a vision of Cold War neurosis, is wound up like a spring, primed to unravel in the final act. Cobb is another of Nolan’s driven loners, and Teddy is Scorsese’s most recent man of uncontrollable rage.
Neither Shutter Island nor Inception are trusting of women (both movies are fairly anti-romance) and the powers-that-be, and both are brimming with paranoia and fatalism. In both films, the the protagonists struggle to escape their respective prisons but ultimately end up willingly trapping themselves in one location or another (the mind of another that Cobb plugs himself into in Inception, and the eponymous prison island Teddy finds himself on in Shutter Island). Ultimate, though, this DiCaprio double bill finds cohesion in the theme of damaged minds – what we see on-screen is a reality cluttered by the protagonists’ own involuntary projections – and it’s here where the films are at their most creative and daring. Together, they make for a provocative double feature, and one that sheds new light on a talented and complex performer.
