DiCaprio’s U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels is introduced as a contradictory figure: a smart, skilled investigator who’s also testy and hot-tempered; an idealist with a clear sense of right and wrong about governments’ power over people and a man with no empathy for the very human individuals who have committed their own acts of violence (he sneers with a cruel dismissiveness: “screw their sense of calm”). His voice and posture seem determined and upright when he’s interrogating people, haunted and broken when talking about himself. One sees him speaking to women at Shutter Island with understanding and sympathy, but when he encounters an unrepentantly violent man, his cold stare shows him trying very hard not to reach out and strangle him (he opts for psychological torture(. And yet, he sounds pained when discussing witnessing the liberation of Dachau, the idea that it can happen here, and that, with his participation in the murder of death camp guards, he has his own demons that he has to make up for.

He does, though in more personal ways than he can admit Those familiar with these kinds of psychological horror films will likely pick up on mentions of his past alcoholism and suggestions of a deeper violent side that he tries and frequently fails to tamp down. Many voiced frustration about “Shutter Island’s” ending, in which we learn that DiCaprio’s character, actually named Andrew Laeddis (a patient “Teddy” mentioned earlier), is himself a patient who’s being put through an elaborate experiment to come to terms with his murder of his mentally ill wife (Michelle WIlliams) after she drowned their children. However, the plot mechanics seem less important on subsequent viewings, at which point DiCaprio and Scorsese’s story of man trying to outrun his guilt clicks into place. DiCaprio’s tough guy act initially seems a bit more forced here than in “The Departed”; it gradually feels like a character convincing himself that he’s the heroic man he wanted so badly to be. His nervy, increasingly paranoid expression (those darting eyes and jerking head movements in the revelation especially) are those of a man working up a sweat to convince us, and himself, that his version of things can be trusted. The character he’s created for himself is his way of proving to himself that he’s not a monster; the flashback to the murder lays bare how a man’s full-bodied grief can give way to a pleading, desperate rage and realization of what he’s actually capable of when faced with total loss. “Shutter Island” shows both a character and an actor coming to terms with their limitations, with the idea that they can only convince themselves and others up to a certain point that they are what they present themselves as. It’s all the more tragic that the former decides it’s better to go to oblivion with the lie than live with the hard truth.

2013: “The Wolf of Wall Street”

After a similar, solid performance in the same year’s “Inception,” DiCaprio’s focus shifted a bit in the early 2010s toward portraying how plainly untrustworthy, even abhorrent people gain and wield trust, influence and power. Though he's hindered a bit by some truly heinous old-age makeup in Clint Eastwood’s flawed but fascinating “J. Edgar,” DiCaprio portrays the FBI director as a man building up myths about himself as a someone whose violations of civil liberties were part of a dogged pursuit of justice and defense of America, only for the film to gradually present him as an ambitious man who abused power to prove that he was “a proficient, remarkable lad capable of proficient and remarkable feats,” as he says to himself in a revealing tongue-twister. He’s equally good in Baz Luhrmann’s otherwise gaudy and misguided adaptation of “The Great Gatsby,” using his inexhaustable charm to cover up both Gatsby’s duplicity and his pathetic need to control and relive the past. In “Django Unchained,” meanwhile, DiCaprio’s by turns courtly and domineering performance shows a man whose most elegant moments bely his brutality, with his bravura monologue on phrenology showing his total commitment to proving that he’s part of a dominant race. With this turn toward showing how charisma can mask malignance, it’s frustrating to see his Oscar win for “The Revenant,” in which his physical commitment can’t overcome how few of his tools are put to use, or fact that the film, and performance, are mostly about themselves and the great effort required for them (with an irritating subtext, confirmed by the pleading final shot, of “what else do I have to do for an Oscar already?”).