2003-11-11

Mystic River is a slow, but effective, atmosphere-heavy film. It goes on for more than two hours, and while I found I was constantly aware of the time, I can't say I was bored or wanted it to be over faster. The movie is a grim testament to guilt, vengeance, grief, and rage, all of which seem to stem from the childhood trauma sustained by one of the main characters.

Dave, Sean, and Jimmy are three friends growing up in a lower-income section of Boston in the 1960s. One day they are playing street hockey when they lose their ball down a gutter and, looking for some other way to amuse themselves, they decide to write their names in the freshly-poured cement on the side of the street. The last boy to take his turn is Dave, and he has only written the first two letters of his name when a big black car pulls up and a man who implies he is a police officer gets out of the car and authoritatively tells Dave to get into the car. Dave hesitantly complies, and his friends watch as the car drives slowly, menacingly, out of sight.

Four days later Dave reappears, scarred forever by his experiences at the hands of the two pedophiles who have kept him hostage in a cellar. Jimmy and Sean feel grief for their friend and guilt at the fact that it was him and not them who were taken away in the car.

Fast forward thirty years or so: Jimmy is now an ex-convict who runs a corner grocery; Sean works for the Massachusetts State Police, high up enough that he can dress in a suit and have Laurence Fishburne as his partner. Dave is--well, Dave is like a zombie who sleepwalks through life and occasionally wakes up to look around him, horrified at what has transpired in his absence. All three men have become distant since their childhood days, and it is only through the murder of Jimmy's 19-year-old daughter that the three are brought together again.

Although the movie teases us about the identity of the murderer, it's not hard to figure out who isn't guilty. Never has a herring looked redder. But this movie isn't really about finding the murderer; to me, it seemed that the primary story revolves around Dave's abduction and the effects that it has had on not only his life, but the lives of his two friends, who seem to act out their survivor's guilt in different ways, ways that eventually bring the three of them back together.

The acting in Mystic River is superb: Clint Eastwood has assembled a cast that literally made my eyebrows shoot up when I saw the names on the screen at the beginning of the film. Tim Robbins is the perfect incarnation of the hollow shell named Dave who is such a cipher that even his own wife feels she doesn't know him. Sean Penn is extremely effective as a man with equal portions of love and rage in his heart: the scene where he discovers that it is his daughter who is the subject of the crime scene is gutwrenching. Kevin Bacon plays his character with just the right combination of inward uncertainty presented as a calm, professional facade. The supporting characters are no less impressive: Laura Linney, Laurence Fishburne, and Marcia Gay Harden are all excellent.

The one dischordant note in the movie comes at the end. I felt that the movie could have ended about ten minutes earlier; there is a scene that feels like the natural end point of the film, and then suddenly we cut to two more superfluous scenes, one of which features a monologue that seems bizarre from that particular character. It's a shame, because I think that for such a slowly-paced film, the direction and writing were otherwise quite tight. Apparently these scenes follow the conclusion of the book quite faithfully, so perhaps it is more a fault of Dennis Lahane than Clint Eastwood, but I think Eastwood should have taken artistic license and cut off the final scenes.

Finally, I should note that Clint Eastwood composed the lugubrious yet beautiful theme music. I had no idea he was a musician, but it appears that the man has many talents, and I was not disappointed by his application of them in Mystic River.

Posted by polarcanuck at 4:30 p.m.

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