Jimmy, Sean, and Dave live on the same block in working-class Boston, young inhabitants of a quietly decaying Irish-Catholic neighborhood where they will all grow up and eventually die. On a gray, anonymous day a few blocks from the Mystic River, the boys are playing street hockey without a care in the world. When their ball is lost to an open sewage grate, the friends pause to write their names in a square of wet sidewalk cement. Jimmy and Sean go first, then Dave, whose signature is interrupted by two plain-clothes men claiming to be police officers. Dave is ushered into the grimy backseat of the men’s car, and the doomed boy waves a plaintive goodbye to his silently watching friends.
The strangers turn out to be sexual predators, and Dave is abused for days before escaping into the woods and making his way home. Guilt-ridden and confused over what has happened, Sean and Jimmy no longer know how to feel about Dave. In one horrible moment, their friendships are erased and the trajectories of their lives etched grimly in a slab of hardening cement.
These events take up roughly five opening minutes of “Mystic River,” but they haunt every frame of its ensuing two-plus hours.
Director Clint Eastwood’s dark drama is difficult to passively watch from a theater seat.
It provokes, alienates, then enthralls before challenging once again. Here is a film that is hard to like but impossible to deny, a brooding investigation of violence, loss, choice, and the hands of fate. History is a constant shackle for each character, cutting them, stifling them, until their futures appear as hopeless as their pasts.
Years after his abduction, Dave still lives in the old neighborhood, where he’s yoked to a mousy wife and a shiftless blue-collar existence. He walks his son to school every day, timidly shuffling past the same sidewalk where his name has remained half-finished in concrete for three decades. Nights find him perched gloomily behind the bar of a riverside dive or transfixed by monster movies on late-night TV. Dave is half a man; he looks to vampires and werewolves as kindred spirits, half-human creatures that at some point transcended or descended into a more savage state of being.
Jimmy made the shift from tough kid on the playground to convicted small-time hood. A convenience store robbery becomes a prison stretch when Jimmy’s partner on the job rats him out for a reduced sentence. After his release he vows to go straight, devoted to forgetting his transgressions and providing for his family. Though still somewhat of an unspoken local kingpin, Jimmy is all polish on the surface, modestly operating his own corner grocery and dutifully attending his youngest daughter’s First Communion.
Only Sean has made lasting attempts to distance himself from his past. He crossed the Mystic years ago to be a city detective. Though he has grown to accept what happened to Dave, he is no closer to understanding it. Also beyond his understanding is why his pregnant wife suddenly left him without so much as a “Dear John…” letter. Confused and alone, he spends his evenings nursing beers, flipping through wedding photos and waiting for his wife to call on the phone, which she does regularly even though she never speaks when Sean picks up the receiver.
Each man has moved on to at least some of the trappings of the stereotypical American Dream, but each dream has its own dark lining. Sean’s dream has vanished without any warning or apparent reason. Jimmy’s dream is tenuous and must always be protected by the cold steel of a gun barrel. Dave’s whole life is a dream, a nightmare he can never articulate, understand, or change.
Each man is still a boy running from something in the past. They fumble for answers-for meaning-alone, inwardly simmering with unspoken anguish. It takes another violent act to bring them together again.
Jimmy’s beloved daughter Katie has fallen in love with Brendan, a match her protective father loudly disapproves of, and the two plan to elope to Vegas without any sort of parental consent. Their plans for happiness are obliterated when Katie is found brutally murdered in a local park, cause enough for Jimmy to howl like a mortally wounded predator at the knowledge of her death. Sean and his no-nonsense partner are the cops on the case, and the prime suspect is Dave, who staggered home on the night of the murder with blood on his hands, a gash on his chest and a fishy story about a mugging gone wrong.
Brian Helgeland (an Oscar-winner for his screenplay of “LA Confidential”) once again proves himself a master of dense, rich crime-drama adaptation.
The script, based on Denis Lehane’s lauded novel of the same name, maintains the punchy air of a mystery-based suspense yarn, but it is deeper than the average pulp thriller, more painful, insightful and emotionally jarring.
The focus is on the characters, not the plot, and that’s the choice that makes “Mystic River” as powerful an experience as it is.
Eastwood has crafted a calculated, methodically paced film that’s worst sin is a pious score penned by the steely-eyed director himself. The distracting musical swells are as grandiose as the rest of the film is subtle, a minor chink in an uncommonly strong suit of armor. Behind the camera, Eastwood is at the top of his craft. He evokes the story’s urban setting with a terse, unflashy authenticity that adds believability to the proceedings and suspense to the action. He masterfully employs cross-cutting to build tension in the film’s tow climactic confrontations. And he trusts his actors, framing them in lingering close-ups, letting the audience share private moments with each of the troubled characters.
No character is more troubled than Dave, and Tim Robbins gets inside the hulking frame of a man who is a horrified spectator to his own disintegration. Dave is a boy lost and trapped inside the skin of a middle-aged man, and Robbins seems to have somehow shrunk himself both inside and out; he is clenched and ready to explode. Eastwood has shot Robbins largely in shadow, with light exposing only half of the actor’s face, a constant reminder of Dave’s truncated maturity. Though he peppers his performance with flashes of shivering paranoia and festering malice, Robbins keeps his emotions mostly under wraps, a smart choice that builds tension, threatening the audience with the possibility that Dave is always a second away from snapping.
Sean Penn, on the other hand, has the daunting task of wearing his emotions unabashedly on his sleeve, while at the same time ushering his character to a chilling final decision that the audience must understand but not expect. Penn plays Jimmy as an essentially good man being seized by evil. He transforms from a benign-albeit muscle-bound and heavily tattooed-family man to a cold shark in a black leather jacket loading his pistol in search of justice for his daughter. Grief and fury are wholly linked for Jimmy, and Penn bares both with fierce abandon. From righteousness to soul-piercing sadness to unwavering bloodlust, Sean Penn does it all in “Mystic River” and does it so well that it may win him the Oscar.
Kevin Bacon plays Sean with the rigid posture of a cop insistent on professionalism but smooth, understated gestures and a soft voice that suggest a man who decides to be gentle when he could just as easily decide to be hard. Sean is the moral compass of the film, and, though his character is marginally underwritten, Bacon brings an unshowy dignity to the role.
Though Sean speaks little of his feelings and acts on them even less, an intriguingly private world of pain looms behind Bacon’s reserved stare. All of the actors seem less like visitors on a movie set than familiar inhabitants of a breathing, fully functioning community. The sense of ongoing daily activity permeates every street corner, the smoke of family history clouds the air of every den. A central theme of the film is the spiraling nature of damage through passing years. Pain seems to push forward through decade after decade, losing reason and explanation but gaining a deadly sort of momentum as it goes. If ancestors leave behind a heritage of violence, how does that impact future generations and their choices?
Eastwood and company paint the Boston neighborhood at the heart of the story as a prison in its own right, a place where decisions are influenced heavily by the past and loyalties forged with the best intentions may damn the protagonists more than save them.
The title “Mystic River” implies a mysterious, fateful quality that the film explores but never prosaically explains. “I know in my soul I contributed to your death,” Jimmy confides to his deceased daughter, “but I don’t know how.” The film shows that Jimmy was unknowingly instrumental in Katie’s demise, but it asks the painful questions of whether his decisions made a difference in the end. Destiny seems to have its cruel way with the film’s central characters, killing Jimmy’s child and stealing Dave’s childhood in the same fell swoop, but is destiny a real force in their lives or is it just an invention of guilty minds seeking to apply logic and order to the coincidental chaos of life? “Mystic River” acknowledges this dilemma but thankfully doesn’t answer it.
The film ends with an unsettling coda that seems to challenge any moral an audience member could draw from the earlier twists in the story. In a look between two wives and a wordless gesture between two old friends, this story ends as it must-clouded in ambiguity yet lightened by the feeling that life goes on. It’s a bittersweet at best; there is hope that a good man may someday subvert the evils of a bad man, but there also resounds the sad knowledge another generation of children has been irrevocably damaged by the neighborhood of their birth and the infinite sins of their fathers.
“Mystic River” has proven popular with critics since its release in early
October, and recently it was nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture. It is the most somber, challenging film to be nominated for Best
Picture since 2001’s “In the Bedroom,” and, like so many great films, it only gets deeper, more satisfying upon a second viewing. Warner Bros. has just re-released the film to the theaters, and I’ve just seen it a second time. If you’ve seen the film already and liked it, see it again. If you haven’t seen it, you’re missing out on the best, most complete American tragedy to hit screens in years. Hypnotic and haunting, “Mystic River” is-in a word – unshakable.