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Mystic River - Special 3-Disc Edition Customer Reviews (34 - 36 of 82 Reviews)
A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do
MYSTIC RIVER may win Clint Eastwood an Oscar for Best Director, but I'd be surprised if the film wins Best Picture because it concludes with too many loose ends and thus fails as a conventional morality play. A rough justice of sorts was at least served in Clint's Oscar-winning UNFORGIVEN.
In the opening sequence, three boyhood pals - Jimmy, Dave and Sean - are playing on the streets of Boston. Jimmy goads the other two into defacing a freshly-poured square of concrete sidewalk. A car pulls up, apparently carrying two plain-clothes cops, one of whom berates the lads for their antisocial behavior. Ultimately, Dave is carried off by the police, ostensibly to be driven home and reported to his mother. In fact, the officers are child molesters in disguise, and Dave is cruelly abused in a cellar for four days before he escapes.
Decades later, the three still live in Boston. Jimmy (Sean Penn), now a tough-guy ex-con, runs a neighborhood convenience grocery. He's married with three daughters, the oldest being Katie (Emmy Rossum), the apple of his eye. Dave (Tim Robbins), a handyman, is married with one son. Sean (Kevin Bacon) is a homicide investigator with the Boston PD.
Late one night, Dave arrives home with a mangled hand and a superficial slash across his stomach. He claims he was attacked by a mugger, and in the ensuing struggle perhaps killed his assailant. The next morning, the police receive report of an abandoned car with a bloodied interior and a bullet hole in the driver's seat back. The vehicle turns out to be Katie's, and her corpse is soon found in a nearby park. She's been brutally beaten and fatally shot after, apparently, being pursued by her killer. Sean is assigned as lead investigator.
Dave's wife Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden) scans the dailies expecting to find report of the dead mugger. Such never appears, and a corrosive doubt eats at her mind. Whom did Dave really kill?
The three principals in this gritty, take-no-prisoners piece (Penn, Robbins, and Bacon) give three noteworthy performances. Those of Penn and Robbins are particularly excellent, and surely merit Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor nominations respectively.
The core of MYSTIC RIVER is not the procedural identification of Katie's killer. Indeed, there are glaring logic lapses as both Jimmy and Sean seek the answer. Moreover, the involvement of the latter and the BPD serve only as the socially acceptable and expected counterpoint to a plot that has little to do with a legal resolution to the crime. Rather, it's an unrelentingly dark tale of deep emotional disturbances resulting from severe childhood trauma, and the potential for extra-legal, primal violence inherent in the philosophy "a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do". I found the film's ending unsatisfying because of its loose ends. But that's not overly important, because the unsettling nature of Eastwood's message is embodied in the Getting There and not the Destination.
You might think that MYSTIC RIVER is a Guy Flick. But that the female of the species also has a role to play in tribalism is indicated by the message given Jimmy by his wife Annabeth (Laura Linney) in the last minutes of the film. One tough babe, that.
A haunting, elegiac film that is more effective on DVD...
Don't ask me why, but there are some movies that work better on the small screen than the large one. To my wonderful surprise, watching Mystic River last night, I discovered that Clint Eastwood's gorgeous, mournful drama/mystery is one of them. There's something about the downsized visuals of the movie combined with the intimacy of home viewing that just makes the movie click even more. And if you have seen it in theaters, I urge you to give it another viewing, for the ensemble acting of the movie is - no question - the finest of the year. Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Laura Linney, Marcia Gay Harden, and Kevin Bacon all form unforgettable characters that truly feel real - just pay close attention to gestures; Linney lighting a cigarette and beckoning the cops inside, the icy torrent of fear that runs through Gay-Harden's body language, and the rigid but broken body and soul of Penn (who now, more than ever, shows that he deserved the Oscar over Bill Murray).
And River actually moves faster than I remembered, mostly thanks to the film's first hour which still is difficult to watch in its unflinching look at tragedy and grief. The whole scene where Penn discovers his daughter's body is a masterpiece of timing and camerawork: when it finally hits him, the omnipotent lens pulls back into the heavens, letting Penn's grief echo as Eastwood's score swells. My favorite shot of the film is a pull-away from the scene of the crime into the Boston sky that floods the screen with white light. In fact, throughout the entire film (especially in its explosive final act) there is so much craft in the direction and acting that it's easy to overlook the film's flaws. Helgeland's screenplay becomes showy occasionally, while Laurence Fishbourne's cop is just annoying and could have been written (and, sorry Larry, acted) better. But even Psycho has a few things I'd rather overlook, and that's why Mystic River, a standard by which other movies will be judged in the future, deserves nothing less than a GRADE: A
Good movie, great acting
"Mystic River" is based upon Dennis Lehane's fine novel of the same name. Eastwood does a good job with what it is basically a faithful retelling of the book. Unfortunately, probably out of necessity, the novel's depths are often given a shorthand treatment that relies a great deal on its actors. And for the most part this works. Penn as Jimmy is terrific. Anguished and angry, his intensity simply jumps off the screen. He deserved the Oscar. But just as good is Tim Robbins, as the damaged Davey. To some extent his role is the more difficult one. Sexually abused as a child, a middle aged failure who has nevertheless succeeded at being a good father and husband despite the psychological black hole he carries around with him. Bacon, less so as Sean. But his character in the novel is similarly hard to grasp, probably because he is not so locked into fate. To some extent he has escaped, but he has his own problems even if he has moved on to a better life (if being a detective so qualifies). On film this plays strangely, and Sean's estranged relationship with his wife, explained in the book, can only draw a "What?" from the viewer who has not read the novel. All the supporting cast give superb efforts, contributing to the movie's long bass note of sadness and tragedy. Still, this is a three star effort, mainly because the stakes are higher. Lehane's novel is essentially Greek Tragedy with a Boston setting. Perhaps Eastwood's chief error is not spending an extra ten minutes or so developing the three "friends" personalities when they were children. Lehane provides considerable layering at the start of his novel, showing the tensions that exist between the boys (and their families), and how these tensions are fueled by the economic and social status each is born in to. In many ways, the neighborhood, as Lehane portrays it, is an oppressive hell hard to escape. Like the sins of our fathers, it is a millstone that is inherited.
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