October 3, 2003 | Like some piercingly
melancholy, way-past-midnight riff of jazz piano, Mystic River can
chill you to the bone even while it breaks your heart. Its setting
is a working-class Boston neighborhood of close-knit families and triple-decker
houses – but its story has the
inexorable drive and cumulative impact of ancient tragedy. Indeed, as
this richly textured and uncommonly compelling drama spins its dark magic,
it achieves the Aristotelian ideal of evoking pity and terror in its
spellbound audience.
Easily the most ambitious film Clint Eastwood has directed since his
Oscar-winning Unforgiven (1992), Mystic River begins
with an act of monstrous evil – all the more horrible because it seems
so arbitrary, so inexplicable – then proceeds to show how, relentlessly,
that calamity continues to shape and twist lives and destinies.
On a fateful afternoon in 1975, two men drive onto a street where three
boys -- Dave Boyle, Jimmy Markum and Sean Devine -- are playing street
hockey. They drive away with Dave in the back seat. Eventually, the abducted
youngster escapes his captors. But Dave can never really escape what
has been done to him and, worse, neither can his two friends.
A quarter-century passes, and we find the
boys have grown into adulthood without moving very far from the scene
of the crime. Sean (Kevin Bacon) is a homicide detective for the Massachusetts
State Police, maybe – the
movie doesn't announce, merely hints – because he wants to avenge violent
crimes. Jimmy (Sean Penn) is an ex-convict who has walked the straight
and narrow ever since his first wife died while he was in prison. (At
least, that's his story, and he's sticking to it.) He operates a corner
grocery with Katie (Emmy Rossum), his beloved 19-year-old daughter, and
Annabeth (Laura Linney), his supportive second wife.
And Dave (Tim Robbins)? Haunted and hesitant,
he's a soft-spoken fellow with a wan smile, a stoop-shouldered gait – and,
especially when he walks his young son to the school bus each morning,
a watchful, wary eye. Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden), Dave's wife, is
almost as skittish as her husband. And her anxiety escalates into mounting
dread after Dave comes home late one night, dazed and stained with
someone else's blood. He claims he grappled with a knife-wielding mugger.
She wants to believe him. The next morning, however, Katie is found
murdered in a neighborhood park.
Celeste can't help suspecting the worst. Unfortunately, she shares those
suspicions with Jimmy.
On its simplest level, Mystic River – which
screenwriter Brian Hegeland ( L.A. Confidential ) adapted,
with scrupulous fidelity, from a gripping novel by Dennis Lehane – is
a murder mystery. While Sean and his partner (Laurence Fishburne) dutifully
gather clues and interrogate witnesses, Jimmy and two former partners
in crime conduct their own inquiry as prelude to claiming blood for
blood.
But the secrets uncovered by both investigations are sufficiently damning
to implicate almost everyone involved. No one gets off easily here, not
even the film's director. The savagely ironic conclusion, propelled by
the toxic commingling of guilt and rage, can be read as Eastwood's pointed
critique of the vigilante spirit celebrated in many of his own action
flicks 20 and 30 years ago.
All of the performances in Mystic River are so extraordinary,
it feels somehow unfair to single out individuals for special praise. But,
then again, since the movie itself underscores the unfairness of life,
I suppose I can say that Penn and Robbins are first and second among equals.
More important, I can state without reservation that Mystic River is
the first movie of 2003 with a legitimate claim to greatness.