Review of Mystic River (2003) by Paul Z — 18 May 2012

Clint Eastwood's powerful comeback as director, continuing one of American cinema's most extensive and most intriguing observations of masculinity, Mystic River is a gloomy, foreboding scowl about a present-day crime internally connected to a past crime. It concerns three boyhood friends in an Irish Boston neighborhood, who were eternally scarred when one of them was snatched by a child molester. As men, their lives have quelled into uptight daily grinds that are disturbed by the freshest emotionally cataclysmic crime. Written by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane, the movie features a league of phenomenal actors adept at unearthing genuine human feelings in a plot that could've been a thriller if its gaze weren't so much more grave, if it didn't summon so much authentic anguish.

The film focuses on the three friends: Jimmy, now an ex-con running the corner store; Dave, a working stiff, and Sean, a homicide detective. All are married; Jimmy to a second wife, Annabeth, who helps raise his oldest daughter and two of their own; Dave to Celeste, who's given him a son; Sean to an AWOL pregnant wife who calls him now and then yet never says anything. The other prominent character is Whitey, Sean's partner. Jimmy watches like a hawk his 19-year-old daughter Katie, who works with him at the store. She's in love with Brendan. Theirs is a sugary flame. Jimmy bitterly objects. They plot to run away together. Alas, before that can happen Katie's discovered mangled and dead. Sean and Whitey are assigned to the case. Brendan is of course a suspect, but so is Dave, who came home late that night, spattered with blood, talking to his wife in distress about a mugger he resisted, may have killed.

While major aspects of Mystic River work in keeping with the style of a police procedural, it's about more than the mere yes-or-no answer of blame, though Jimmy claims he will murder the person who murdered his daughter, and we have no cause to question him, mainly after he enlists neighborhood goons to lead their own investigation. It's about anguish descending through the decades, about unuttered closet skeletons, silent distrust. And it's very much about the individual honor of husbands and wives. Annabeth has a scene where she identifies with Jimmy's compulsion for revenge, and it's not far-fetched to parallel her character to Lady Macbeth. Celeste gradually starts to suspect Dave's story about the mugger and communicates her suspicions. We see one wife brutally allegiant, another who feels she has been excluded from some abysmal cell of her husband's heart.

While the plot ultimately reaches a definite resolution, it's not about the resolution. It's about the venture there. It supplies each of its actors with scenes that measure their boundaries. Both Penn and Robbins generate desperate and stunning tension as they are interrogated by the police. Most memorable is their first man-to-man talk in years after Katie's death. There's a definite strand of suspense between Whitey, who believes Dave clearly responsible, and Sean, who's disinclined to doubt a childhood friend. There are such abysmal lagoons of bitterness and murderous feelings surrounding the funeral that we anticipate an eruption at any instant, but the simmering of the characters is all deep-seated. And forever that day in the past drifts as a voice from their collective past. Compounding Dave's agony was the apprehension the other two boys always had about him. Perhaps they didn't completely grasp what happened to him---how could they?---but somehow they no longer felt the same about their defiled friend, a life arrested in midstream.

Penn's performance is one of the unequivocal engravings of the apex of a realist masculine tradition that engendered Brando, Dean, Pacino, De Niro. He has rid his technique of any breath of staginess or window dressing while absorbing all the straightforwardness and power that the Method's brought into American movies. Bacon, flirting with apathy, is excellent, as is Fishburne, whose drollery and questioning keep us from being submerged in the dark. Whitey's the one main character who's not associated with the insulated lineage of the neighborhood, and his wisecracks and seasoned comments are in some sense visitations from the outside world. Robbins, in some ways, confronts the ultimate assignment because he must play a man whose violated identity is an erratic composite of emotional nakedness and ferocity, innocence and deception. We feel crushingly, unfathomably sorry for him, but he puts others off, including Marcia Gay Harden, who as Celeste gives the film its most disconcerting portrait of horror and despair, just as Laura Linney, as Annabeth, arising from the abyss later on, expresses with devastating certainty the viciousness that functions as justice in their collapsed domain.

This is Clint Eastwood's 24th film as director, and one of the handful of them where he doesn't also cast himself. He asserts here a full-toned unity with the characters and their actors, who are given wounding moments of truth. Invariably a downplaying actor himself, he unearths in his three actors watersheds of solitude and repression. Robbins grieves within his own despair, watches vampire movies on TV to identify analogies for his state of mind. Bacon aches all the time due to the void his wife has left. Penn's a brutal man who fixes to react brutally but has not, we see, found much relief that way in the past. To see potent acting like this is invigorating and breathtaking. It's vital to be continually reminded that movies can see, hear and conscientiously relate to their characters. Directors reach the top drawer by withholding, not embellishing: Eastwood does nothing for ornament, everything for impact.