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When the credits started to roll at the end of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, I was left with an unexpected question. What was the point?

Here is a film that would have won Oscars aplenty back in 1956, the year it takes place. But alas, it is now 2010 and there isn’t a single idea or thought in the film that hasn’t been had a thousand times before and better. What is it then that has attracted a director of Scorsese’s calibre and actors like Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo and Emily Mortimer?

The answer will become obvious once you lay eyes upon the film. It’s all about the style and atmosphere. This is not the kind of movie often made in the 21st century and it must have been enormous fun to make. As a viewer, it is a curious wonder to behold. There isn’t a thought or sensibility that exists within Scorsese’s movie that would be alien to the world of 1956. As a result, it takes some getting used to.

The style requires the actors to talk in pseudo-serious tones and deliver over-heated treatises that extend well beyond the terse soundbites most modern scripts require.  The camera spirals up and around the characters and there are quick pans to new scenes and wipes for others. There are long dark, hallways, moldering basements, wailing rainstorms, ominous cliffs and the kind of psychobabble that reveals a certain social naivete towards mental illness. No one behaves as we suspect they might, but instead they adhere to an out-of-date cinematic code that would be most welcome in a film noir.

One thing I love about Scorsese is his ability to make a film free of ironic sentiment. There isn’t any winking or nodding going on in Shutter Island nor does it feel the need to make the characters smarter than the movie they find themselves in. In doing this, he pulls stronger and more natural performances from his actors. For my money, he has been the only director capable of getting a robust performance from Dicaprio. Leo might be wrong for the square-jawed, damaged Federal marshal, but he plays the unhinged part with a recklessness that enhances the rising tension.

Emily Mortimer, Michelle Williams and Patricia Clarkson are the females here, and none of them are typical damsels in distress or femme fatales. They sometimes exist as all of them and none of them, and Williams in particular gets some awfully chilling moments towards the close. It is always good to see Ben Kingsley, but even better when he’s giving it his all and not just cashing a paycheck. No fear, Sir Ben is at the top of his form and I was more than happy to see the creased, world-weary face of Max Von Sydow peek around the edge of the German doctor’s chair.

On a visual level, there are sights worth savoring. There is a handsome and lonely quality to the imagery that makes it a dark pleasure to drink in.  It is hard to describe the shivers of delight that accompany a moment like the one where Dicaprio, wrapped in the feverish dementia of his own grief-stricken dreams, holds Williams while a large smoldering hole containing thousands of flickering embers opens in her back. Later there are just shivers as hundreds and hundreds of rain-soaked rats pour from a crevice in the rock face and clambor to and fro on the craggy cliffs, inches away from the revolted marshal.

As moviegoers, we have been trained to enter a thriller with a keen awareness of the endgame and to believe that each piece only exists to lead to the next, building an arcane vertebrae connecting an all important conclusion. If those pieces cannot support the whole, or if we can’t reconcile the pieces, then we may reject the entire creation. As it turns out, Shutter Island could care less about building a water-proof mystery that holds up to scrutiny. It lives and breathes its own aesthetic beauty, savoring each unkempt graveyard and solitary lighthouse with a near hedonistic abandon.

Shutter Island wants to live free of the cares and concerns of its plot, but in the end the brittle narrative  apprehends the film and slams the iron door shut on Scorsese’s pulpy aspirations. He needed a better story for all of his dark props, eerie sets, and leering actors to inhabit. If not a better one, then at least one that feels fresher. Dennis LeHane’s story isn’t the lifeblood of the film, but it proves an unwelcome distraction from Island’s Gothic excess all the same. When the ’so what?’ comes it is a direct result of the saggy, predictable conclusion.

I didn’t love Shutter Island, despite its many good qualities. It’s a great entertainment if you don’t think much about it, but it’s hard not to see the film as a disappointment. There are moments of sincere power and then, too, entire sequences that simply don’t work. A significant lack of dramatic tension in the late going dilutes its status as a thriller. Still, it cannot be denied that the movie possesses a quality that isn’t often seen in the genre; good, old fashioned paranoia.

In 2008, Scorsese directed a documentary about Val Lewton, the 40′s era producer that developed films like The Body Snatcher and Cat People, the latter of which features one of the finest chase scenes in the history of the movies. I’d like to think if Lewton saw Shutter Island, he’d be there, saluting Martin, and offering his hand from the shadows.

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