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Mystic River - Special 3-Disc Edition Customer Reviews (67 - 69 of 82 Reviews)

Uncompromising, grueling. A cinematic powerhouse.
Infused with near-biblical power, Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River" is a straight hard drink of masculine theory, a journey into the world's dark, vengeful crevices, where the strong eat the weak, yet are not spared by God, and pay dearly for the feast. Beginning in the streets of Boston during the 1978 baseball pennant race and ending 25 years later on the banks of the title river, Eastwood transforms Dennis Lehane's novel into a portrait on the permanence of tragedy and untidy justice.

The seams of the plot burst wide open in the film's final 20 minutes, but by then the hooks are in us as much as they are three dye-in-the-wool Irishmen - Jimmy (Sean Penn), Sean (Kevin Bacon) and Dave (Tim Robbins) - caught in a storm of fate that starts to churn when they're 12 years old, as Dave is molested by men pretending to be cops. Dave escapes them after four days, but he's marked - the adult Dave likens it to the undead state of a vampire - and by that adulthood he's lost touch with Jimmy, a shrewd, anguished ex-con running a corner grocery market, and Sean, a square-jawed homicide detective.

But their lives intersect again when Jimmy's oldest daughter, Katie (Emmy Rossum), is murdered in a nearby park. Dave - who returned home to his wife Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden) awash in blood and a gash across his belly - is a likely suspect, as is Katie's secret boyfriend (Tom Guiry), who had planned to elope with her to Las Vegas and has more ties to Jimmy than it first seems. Sean and his sharp, no-nonsense partner Whitey (Laurence Fishburne, nicely low key) lead the murder investigation. Jimmy, meanwhile, has his own team of interrogating thugs.

Eastwood, always for substance over plot, wisely pushes the emotional intangibles of Lehane's novel, bearing his camera down on these haunted men and their frailties, while offering Penn free reign to chew whatever scenery he sees fit: His Jimmy is a smart, passionate man, capable of deep love and deep hate, and always mindful of a criminal side he can tap in a flash.

Penn has always been a mannered, showy actor, and this performance might be filled with more dramatic blarney than any of his celebrated roles, but he is magnetic in scene after scene; when one character suggests Jimmy could rule the town, we believe it. Penn is a lock for every award nomination they've got to give.

The rest of the cast is informed by Penn's work, and equally good. Robbins is perfectly cast as a sad-eyed, shut down giant stalked by his own shadow. Dave isn't stupid - watch how swiftly he turns the tables on Sean and Whitey during one interrogation - but broken, and hardly comforted by his timid wife, played by Harden as a bundle of nerves barely holding herself together. Bacon essentially inhabits the Joe Friday role, though his character is wrapped up in a bizarre subplot with a long-estranged wife who calls him up only to say nothing. Guiry is fine as the boyfriend, and Laura Linney, in a small role as Jimmy's wife, Annabeth, is given a rather cruel, unlikely speech in the movie's final moments that nonetheless hammers home the have/have-not theme on which the movie thrives.

As a director, Eastwood is notoriously quick and economical; as a result, some of his more recent films - "Absolute Power," "True Crime" and "Blood Work" - have been thin and visually flat. But the 73-year-old is up to this material, and much like his masterpiece "Unforgiven," Eastwood has the strong script (from "LA Confidential" writer Brian Helgeland) and actors to tackle a fast shoot. "Mystic River" is stark and naturally lit. The few flourishes it takes - a God's eye view of the murder scene, a screen of pure white during the movie's climax, helicopter tours of the dark, velvet river - are masterful touches.

"Mystic River" is such a tense, moving experience for much of its running time that the ending, which includes a left-field suspect and a turn of events that fly in the face with judicial reality, is a bit of disorienting letdown. Linney's speech, and that final, cocky shot of Penn, is likely to draw a few looks of disbelief. But the movie has so enforced the idea of lifelong spiritual debt that, while "Mystic River" ends, there is a distinct sense that the characters have not finished their penance. As one character says: "God says you owed another marker. He came to collect."

Mystic River (2003)
Director: Clint Eastwood
Cast: Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne, Marcia Gay Harden, Laura Linney.
Running Time: 125 minutes.
Rated R for violence and language.

"Mystic River" delves into the unspeakable world of a boyhood friendship secret, in which three young boys were confronted by a mysterious, dark man who proceeds to kidnap one of the children and torture him for days. As the story moves to present day Boston, the audience learns that the three boys have moved on with their lives, working in different professions and starting families, but the undying enigma of their past haunts their every move.

Sean Penn stars as a local crook-turned-fairly successful businessman who tragically loses his teenage daughter when she is found murdered near a bar. The initial clues lead to his molested childhood friend (played brilliantly by the creepy Tim Robbins), who was out late that night and has begun to act extremely strange around his wife and friends. Hot on the murder case is the third of the youth trio, a slick officer (Kevin Bacon) who has separated from his wife and searching for more than just answers to a crime. As Penn uses the underground to hopefully find the killer and put his despair to rest, Bacon's character must interrogate his disturbed long-time friend, in hopes that he really is not the vicious killer.

Clint Eastwood's direction is articulate and scrupulous, making "Mystic River" one of the more strikingly effective films of the year. The first two-thirds of the film are superb, with the Oscar-winning Penn (in the role that he was born to play) morphing from a father full of anguish, into an unwavering maniac in seek of the truth. The ending is not a disappointment, but certainly unexpected and unusual-perhaps leaving a bad taste in some mouths. "Mystic River" is a taut, intense film that will certain strike with its excellent cast and direction, but the slightly uneven adaptation of the Dennis Lehane novel may leave some wanting more.

"Maybe someday you'll forget what it's like to be human..."
"Mystic River" is, by far, one of Clint Eastwood's finest films to date. Adapted for the screen by Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential, Payback, Blood Work) from the book of the same name by Dennis Lehane, the writers take what typically would have been a simplistic murder mystery/thriller and turned it into one of the most engrossing, fascinating, and heartbreaking films I've seen all year. Essentially, "Mystic River" is about how the past never leaves us and how the events in our past, especially in our childhood, affect us as we grow older and lastly, how grief affects people differently, in both good and bad ways.

The movie follows the individual fates of three childhood friends and their families, Jimmy Marcus (Sean Penn), Dave Boyle (Tim Robbins), Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon), whose lives were forever changed by a nightmarish childhood incident. The pain resulting from this incident and another that occurs to one of their children when the friends are adults is a metaphor for the river of grief (thus the title) that, unbeknownst to them all, binds each of these men together. Grief, as it always does, brings each of the men closer together, but ultimately results in tragedy for everyone involved.

Hands down, this is one of the finest casts ever to be assembled on screen. Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne, Marcia Gay Harden, Laura Linney. Wow, can it get any better than that? And it's not as if these actors are all just thrown together with no chemistry whatsoever. They all work together so well and none of the actors end up stealing the spotlight. Each actor disappears into their roles with startling ease, leaving their big Hollywood names behind and truly becoming their characters, Boston accents and all.

My only problem with this film is its last act. Fore me, it simply did not live up to the high caliber artistry of the rest of the movie. I was so engrossed in this film and was expecting an ending to match it, but found myself ultimately dissatisfied with the solution the writer offered. I felt as if he'd "taken the easy way out".

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