Put this one on your "Must see," list folks. Looks like it will take a lot of Oscars.
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DEAD RECKONING
by DAVID DENBY
“Mystic River” Issue of 2003-10-13
New Yorker Magazine
Clint Eastwood has directed good movies in the past (“Unforgiven,” “A Perfect World”), but he has never directed anything that haunts one’s dreams the way “Mystic River” does. This extraordinary film, an outburst of tragic realism and grief, was shot in Catholic working-class Boston, a landscape of forlorn streets and brown shingle houses and battered cars. Yet there’s nothing depressing about “Mystic River” as an experience of art. The movie has the bitter clarity and the heady exhilaration of new perceptions achieved after a long struggle, and one enjoys it not only for itself—it’s fascinating from first shot to last—but as a breakthrough for Eastwood, who, at the age of seventy-three, may be just hitting his peak as a director. Based on a fine, scrupulous Dennis Lehane novel, “Mystic River” offers nothing less than a lucid detailing of malaise, a sense of fatality that slowly and stealthily expands its grasp throughout a community—a foul bloom taking over a garden.
One afternoon in the late seventies, three mischievous boys, Dave, Sean, and Jimmy, are cussed out by a couple of men in dark suits claiming to be cops. Dave, doing what he’s told, gets into a car with the men. There’s something not quite right about these cops (one of them wears what looks like the ring of a Catholic order), but what are Sean and Jimmy supposed to do? They’re just boys. Eastwood lets us know in the briefest of flashes that Dave is then sexually assaulted in a basement for four days and that he finally escapes into the woods. The movie jumps ahead twenty-five years, and it turns out that Dave (Tim Robbins) hasn’t escaped at all; none of the three have. No longer friends, the men are held together nonetheless by a bond of shame and disgust; they’ve lived their entire lives in the shadow of the crime. Tim Robbins’s Dave has remarkable flights of feeling, but he’s a vague and tentative man, enshrouded in dreams and terrors, and his wife (Marcia Gay Harden), a bluff Boston woman, finds him mystifying and even frightening. Sean (Kevin Bacon) has become a homicide detective with the Massachusetts state police, a bright anxious fellow who makes skittish jokes to cheer himself up. He’s a good detective but a closed-off guy emotionally, and his pregnant wife has left him. Jimmy (Sean Penn) is the tough one. A family man, he has a tigress of a wife (Laura Linney) who adores him as protector and stud, and he runs a corner grocery store that has become a neighborhood stronghold, but we learn by degrees that years ago he served time for robbery. Suspicious and vindictive, Jimmy’s got a streak of violence in him that runs through the movie like a humming power line.
When Jimmy’s lovely nineteen-year-old daughter is killed one night, in a park, the crime brings the three men back together—the troubled Dave as a suspect, Sean as the detective conducting the investigation into the murder, and Jimmy as the victim’s father, a man now mad with grief who thinks he has the right to find the killer and eliminate him. Jimmy is not a simple avenger. “I know in my soul I contributed to your death, but I don’t know how,” he says at the girl’s grave—an astonishing remark, because it suggests how much guilt he carries around with him. We then understand how closely his rage is tied—and has always been tied—to his bad feelings over the atrocity perpetrated earlier on his boyhood friend. Jimmy is both guilty and overprepared to take revenge. Heavily muscled, Sean Penn wears an enormous cross tattooed on his back, but his Jimmy recognizes no law, religious or secular. He lives with an ex-con’s certainty that he can’t trust anyone, that only his own will can keep him alive. Jimmy is not so much evil as morally chaotic and infinitely dangerous. At times, Penn plays him as the kind of cursing, unreachable guy you might see in a bar, and then, a few minutes later, he takes off into poetic soliloquies, and he’s up there with Marlon Brando as a great tormented screen actor.
The screenwriter Brian Helgeland does for this movie what he did for “L.A. Confidential”—provide a thick cross-hatching of friendships, loyalties, and remembered betrayals, each person and event jostling all the others. The movie’s feeling for the neighborhood milieu is so convincing in part because there’s no distinction between background and foreground—everything we see (faces, living rooms, scraggly back yards) is dramatically relevant. By the end of the movie, we know this place, for good and for ill—the sour flatness of the accents, the women clinging to their men. The weave is so thick that there’s no distance between past and present, either. As Sean and his partner (Laurence Fishburne, in a light, sure performance) set about solving the murder, they uncover the details of old crimes, and each piece of new information modifies what we know about the three men. Some of the great film noirs from the forties also brought the past to bear on the present, but those films weren’t made as realistic dramas. “Mystic River,” with its gray, everyday light, is a work of art in a way that, say, “The Big Sleep” and “Out of the Past,” which were shaped as melodrama and shot in glamorous chiaroscuro, were not. “Mystic River” is as close as we are likely to come on the screen to the spirit of Greek tragedy (and closer, I think, than Arthur Miller has come on the stage). The crime of child abuse becomes a curse that determines the pattern of events in the next generation.
Clint Eastwood may have specialized in cold, dead-eyed killers when he was young, but it’s long been obvious that the man had serious interests and ambitions. Yet no one, I think, could have expected him to pass so thoroughly from the shallowly mythic to the profoundly matter-of-fact—no one could have expected a movie bound by the knotted-up contingencies of family and neighborhood life. Eastwood works with great steadiness. He brings the three men together slowly, tentatively, each eying the others with distaste. When Jimmy realizes that his daughter is dead, he howls in misery, and the camera rises operatically above him, but, apart from that moment, there’s very little visual rhetoric. Instead, Eastwood heightens one scene after another through sheer dramatic concentration and his control of the performances. Kevin Bacon tightens his facial muscles into a mask—he’s pale, distant, intelligent. Tim Robbins’s puffy-frog features, his temperamental indistinctness, work for the confused and hushed Dave, and Penn burns up the air around him. This movie is a historic achievement: Clint Eastwood, an icon of violence, has made us loathe violence as an obscenity. “Mystic River” hurts the way sad stories always hurt, but the craft and love with which it has been made transfigure pain into a moviegoer’s rapture.
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