10 Heart-Breaking Film Moments When The Hero Became The Villain
3. Teddy Daniels - Shutter Island
Leonardo DiCaprio really gets put through the wringer when he works with Martin Scorsese. If he's not playing a deranged billionaire with excessive ambitions and more money with sense (The Aviator, Wolf Of Wall Street) then he's a morally ambiguous but gold-hearted man who, try as he might, just can't get himself out of a bad situation (Gangs Of New York, The Departed). Falling into the latter camp is his role in Shutter Island, playing police detective Teddy Daniels, who's sent to Ashecliffe, the psychiatric hospital on the eponymous atoll to find a missing person, but he quickly learns that all the pieces of this puzzle don't add up to anything that makes sense. What's more, everyone on the island seems to be confrontational and afraid of Daniels, whose ulterior motive for taking the case is to track down Andrew Laeddis - the man responsible for the death of his wife some years earlier who is incarcerated on the island - and hints that something sinister is at work at Ashecliffe abound. Teddy finds the answers he's looking for, but they're nothing like what he expected. Upon losing his partner and breaking into a lighthouse where he believes the Ashecliffe staff are performing mind-control experiments, he finds a doctor who explains that he's actually a patient on the island, committed for killing his manic-depressive wife after she drowned their children, and his name, Edward Daniels, is really an anagram of his true name, Andrew Laeddis. Teddy has trouble accepting this but seems to take it on board, although the doctors warn that he appeared to have recovered some months earlier before regressing into fantasy once more. Though Teddy's realisation of his guilt is shocking in its own way, the film's most truly heartbreaking moment when he appears to have slipped once more into delusion, signalling to the staff that lobotomy is the only solution left. However, before he's taken away, he asks his doctor, "Which would be worse? To live as a monster, or a die as a good man?", suggesting that he knows exactly what's wrong with him and can't bear living with himself.
