MOVIE REVIEW

Mystic River  (2003)

Starring: Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne, Marcia Gay Harden, Laura Linney
Director: Clint Eastwood

Rating: R

Studio: Warner Bros.

Release Date: 10.08.03

Review Posted: 10.08.03

Spoilers: Minor

By Sara M. Fetters

"Mystic River" a Masterpiece of Mourning and Regret

“It makes you feel alone to hurt somebody. It makes you feel alone.”

Those words are uttered about halfway through Clint Eastwood’s latest effort, the devastatingly powerful “Mystic River.” At once, it’s a feeling of what it must be like to be a decent human being forced into acts of vengeance and cruelty. But from another angle, it can also be a statement of repentance; eternal guilt that an evil begot from an evil will tear down a person to their lowest ebb, leaving them stranded at place much nearer to death than any semblance of normal living.

Based on the acclaimed novel by Dennis Lehane, “Mystic River” is about how one monstrous event can change everything. Not just for the victim who suffered it, although their loss for obvious reasons is the most damning, but for those most closely connected to it as well. It is about death, not only in the literal sense, and the struggle to regain a life of some emotional feeling and connection in the face of unparalleled tragedy.

Needless to say, Eastwood’s film is not for the faint of heart. Dark and foreboding, it travels into corners of revenge and regret that have been a hallmark of the actor’s work behind the camera. In the last 20 years, especially, Eastwood has shown a stubborn willingness to take people into the dankest recesses of moral ambiguity, where the retribution for unspeakable evil can be almost as damning as the villainy that precipitated it. “Mystic River” is a gruesome exercise, a funeral precession of heartache and pain. It’s also the best movie made by any American filmmaker this year, and quite possible the best thing Eastwood has ever done as a director.

As children, friends Jimmy, Dave and Sean were inseparable. They spent their days playing innocently on the tiny neighborhood streets in front of their Boston homes, completely oblivious to the dangers of the world kept hidden from them by their close, working-class families. That all changes one morning when two men dressed as police detectives force Dave into their car because of some minor sidewalk vandalism. But these aren’t police officers, and young, slightly awkward Dave is subjected to four days of abuse and violation almost too inhuman to believe. Somehow he manages to supervise a physical escape from his captors, but his emotional well-being is far from a given. Meanwhile, Jimmy and Sean live with the fact they allowed their friend to get in the car and the nightmares of what-might-have-been had they went with the two elder men instead of their ungainly buddy.

Years later, Jimmy (Sean Penn) is an ex-con hammering out a straight and narrow existence running a local convenience store. He’s married to a beautiful and caring second wife, Annabeth (Laura Linney), with whom he’s had two young girls. He also has a headstrong, fiercely independent elder daughter, Katie (Emmy Rossum), from his first marriage, and it is her love in the face of his first wife’s death and his own imprisonment that forced Jimmy to take up the daily life of an honest man.

Dave (Tim Robbins), meanwhile, has found some semblance of happiness in marriage and fatherhood. His wife, Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden), is Annabeth’s cousin, and together they have a young son who looks up to his father with the adoring eyes only a child can have. But Dave isn’t whole. Unable to hold a steady job, prone to an eerie quietness bordering on the spooky, he still hasn’t let go of the horrors done to him as a child. Coming home one night covered in blood and viciously gashed through chest claiming to have just brutalized a mugger, a real possibility exists that the small boy forced to fend for himself against the most heinous of human wolves may have just mentally snapped in two as an adult.

Of the three, the one that’s severed all ties with the others is Sean, now a Boston detective working with a strenuously dogmatic partner ironically named Whitey (Laurence Fishburne). Together, these two have just been assigned a case that will bring all three former friend’s lives crashing back together, forever changing them in ways they can not begin to anticipate. For when Katie is brutally beaten, shot and brutalized almost beyond recognition, years of pent-up anger, aggression and mournful hurt will rise to the surface, leveling everyone that tries to stand in its wake.

As a director, Eastwood has always been known for his knack at eliciting the best from his cast. “Mystic River” is no exception. Bacon rises to levels I haven’t seen since his daring turn in “Murder in the First,” while Fishburne and Rossum (making me revaluate every nasty thing I ever though about her as an actress after “Passionada”) have a moment or two that bring their thinly structured supporting characters to vivid life. Robbins, very much in the quiet and emotionally guarded outcast mode he seems to be sort of stuck in of late, is still quite effective, bringing a power to his scenes with Harden that border on psychologically crippling.

Both Linney and Harden do amazing work with what, on the surface, look like throwaway characters. In both cases, though, their importance to the proceedings and emotions of “Mystic River” is deftly made clear, Eastwood only giving the two the briefest sequences to make that clear. While the facet that both of these Oscar-nominated (in Harden’s case Oscar-winning) actresses pull it off isn’t a surprise, but they do it to such earth-shattering effect that certain facets of their performances seem to almost burn right through the screen.

But, if anyone burns the screen, it is Sean Penn. His raw, unvarnished take here is one for the ages. He has a moment in a park near the ravaged body of his daughter, a moment where he is never actually allowed to see her – all he needs to know about her fate written on the face of his former friend Sean – that is apocalyptic in its intensity. This a ravaged, doggerel look at revenge and retribution, Penn owning the picture and our ever-evolving sympathies even as we know he’s quickly moving nearer and nearer to eternal damnation and disaster. In my years as a critic, this is one of the best performances by an actor I have ever seen; there really isn’t any other way to put it.

Brian Helgeland, working with Eastwood for the second time in two years after last summer’s “Blood Work,” adapts Lehane’s novel brilliantly. This is a script rich in texture and nuance, free flowing through time and emotion like no other picture so this year. It really is hard to believe that the man responsible for two of the great crime film adaptations of our time – this and the Oscar-winning “L. A. Confidential” – is also the same man who brought us the unrelentingly awful “The Order” just one month a go.

As for Eastwood, once again he has assembled a crack team of technicians, led by long-time editor Joel Cox (22 films with the director since 1976’s Dirty Harry opus “The Enforcer”) and production designer Henry Bumstead (who’s been involved one way or another with an Eastwood movie since 1972’s “Joe Kidd”). Their work here is exemplary, as is the talents of cinematographer Tom Stern (“Blood Work”) who’s exquisite camerawork brings this Shakespearean-style epic constantly into crystalline focus. Eastwood himself takes on a new role this time around, scoring the movie himself with ethereally mournful music supervised by longtime collaborator Lennie Niehaus and recalling Phillip Glass at his best.

But it is as a director where this movie legend excels. For the first time since 1997’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” Eastwood stays completely behind the camera, leaving the acting chores to his talented cast. It’s a good move, for this is easily his most focused and concentrated effort with a lens since his Oscar-winning triumph “Unforgiven,” and in many ways is the best job Eastwood has ever done as a director. Bereft of the mythic sensibilities of the Old West and forced to deal with modern day humanity, the former Harry Callahan marches this film with a precision and forcefulness he’s not managed before. And even if he does stumble a time or two – a subplot involving Bacon and his estranged wife never works quite like it should – “Mystic River” is so monstrously powerful at the coda that those faults are easily forgiven.

Forgiveness. In many ways, that is what “Mystic River” is asking for its characters. That their choices, in many ways, were taken away from them due to the tragedy of their youth and, as such, they shouldn’t be held responsible for an adulthood of insecure disappointment and calamity. It would be easy to give it to them, to give in and say it will all be okay. But Eastwood refuses, and “Mystic River” attains a solemnity of bereaving greatness befit a modern masterpiece.

Rating: êêêê  (out of 4)

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