director
Clint Eastwood
screenwriter
Brian Helgeland
based on
the novel by
Dennis
Lehane
producers
Clint Eastwood
Judie Hoyt
Robert Lorenz
cinematographer
Tom Stern
music
Clint Eastwood
Lennie Niehaus
editor
Joel Cox
cast
Sean Penn (Jimmy)
Tim Robbins (Dave)
Kevin Bacon (Sean)
Laurence Fishburne (Whitey)
Marcia Gay Harden (Celeste)
Laura Linney (Annabeth)
Emmy Rossum (Katie)
Eli Wallach (Mr. Looney)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 137m
u.s.
release: October 8,
2003
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other clint
eastwood films
reviewed on this website:
- absolute
power
- blood
work
- midnight
in the garden
of good and evil
- million
dollar baby
- space
cowboys
- true
crime
- unforgiven
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In the bleak and despairing
Mystic River, men sit in rumpled Boston apartments and
bars and package stores, pursued in their minds by the furies
of the past. Directing his twenty-fourth feature, Clint Eastwood
delivers a true rarity -- a work of high seriousness with a laid-back,
unemphatic touch. The movie, like most Eastwood films, takes
its time; the camera settles in and meditates on the characters,
giving them space to reveal or conceal. The style offers realism
as a kind of grim poetry. The plot, taken from a Dennis Lehane
novel, verges on gimmicky at times -- or seems to, because
you expect it to make good on some of its less plausible red
herrings (to its credit, it doesn't) -- but the story is firmly
grounded in emotion, the ghosts of loss and shame.
On one level, Mystic River
is almost Sleepers
for those who hated Sleepers: Here's another drama starring
Kevin Bacon in which boys linked together by abuse grow into
men haunted by demons of vengeance. But this is the movie Sleepers
could only dream of being. Three boys, typical city kids who
watch one of their number taken away by two mysterious men who
give the impression they're cops, bring the experience into adulthood.
We see how each man has adjusted. Jimmy (Sean Penn), who runs
a corner shop, has done some time for robbery and still has shady
acquaintances from his lawless days. Sean (Kevin Bacon) went
the opposite way, becoming a Boston homicide detective whose
cold-eyed devotion to his work may have driven away his pregnant
wife. Dave (Tim Robbins) is indistinct, unfinished, as if the
abuse he suffered at the hands of those two men as a boy had
stunted not only his emotions but his soul.
Jimmy's cheerful 19-year-old
daughter Katie (Emmy Rossum, from Passionada)
is murdered, and the event brings the three childhood friends
together, uneasily. Almost gagging on his own grief -- at one
point, sitting and talking to Sean and his partner (Laurence
Fishburne), Jimmy looks as though he's about to have a heart
attack -- the bereaved father demands rough justice. He cooperates
with Sean, but we know his agenda doesn't include jail time for
his child's killer. Sean chases a few leads, most of which go
nowhere, though one leads to Dave's door. We know what Sean doesn't:
on the night of the murder, Dave came home to his wife (Marcia
Gay Harden) with blood on his hands and a gash on his stomach.
He tells her he had a run-in with a mugger. He tells a different
story to Jimmy, and yet another one to Sean.
The performances are uniformly
superb -- Penn compellingly explosive/implosive, Bacon intelligent
and holding emotion at arm's length -- but it's Tim Robbins'
movie. Two built-in devices draw our attention to Dave -- he
was abused as a boy and looks like the likeliest suspect in the
girl's murder -- and Robbins underplays, giving us a morose palooka
who sounds dense one minute and then weaves unexpected (if muddled)
webs of metaphor, struggling to articulate his feelings. (In
one dark scene he speaks of vampires and werewolves, baffling
his wife and us.) Dave has a son of his own, and when he walks
with the boy down the street where Dave was abducted, Robbins
stands stock still, a dark sad exclamation point, and fills his
eyes with the boy as if the intensity of his gaze could keep
his son safe. Robbins has a heartbreaking scene near the end,
too, a speech that could be driven by any number of emotions:
confusion, guilt, resignation.
You realize that Eastwood,
who left his vigilante pulp behind him over a decade ago, has
crafted a work that persuades us to sympathize with a man who
could be a brutal murderer. Screenwriter Brian Helgeland (who
also wrote Eastwood's previous film, Blood
Work) grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts and worked
as a fisherman for a while; he knows how working-class New Englanders
talk, leaving volumes unspoken between debates on the Red Sox.
The characters are usually talking about two or three subtextual
things (some of which we don't learn till later), and when the
men in the movie look at each other, they're really seeing a
black car driving away with their childhood. With Eastwood's
help, we see it too.
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