River of Sorrows
Murder drama Mystic River offers bruising glimpse into an entire community of damaged goods
by Jim Ridley
Mystic River
Dir.: Clint Eastwood
R, 137 min.
Now showing at area theaters
Clint Eastwood’s bruising Mystic River opens with the black-and-white Warner Bros. logo over pitch darkness, as if signaling the start of a 1930s gangster movie. In a sense, that’s what follows. Early crime dramas like Angels With Dirty Faces laid open the secret workings of city life. Justice, or cosmic retribution, may have triumphed in the end, but the world clearly operated by laws not written in books; loyalty to one’s roots, one’s buddies and one’s neighborhood trumped the legal right and wrong.
Like those movies, Mystic River concerns the city as underworld and the blood ties that bind a community. It even uses the gangster-movie template of the neighborhood kids who grow up on opposite sides of the law. But the crisp black-and-white of the ’30s pictures has given way to a scarred, desolate gray. If a kid grew up with the romanticized moral codes of gangster movies, then tried to apply them to the world around him, the result would resemble Mystic River’s chain of perpetuating sorrows—or, as Eastwood implies, the world we live in.
There is no such thing as an isolated incident in Eastwood’s morality play, adapted by screenwriter Brian Helgeland from Dennis Lehane’s novel. The setting is a working-class Boston neighborhood, the kind where a guy might live his whole life from womb to tomb within a few city blocks. In the clammy opening scene, three kids writing their names in a concrete sidewalk are stopped by men with handcuffs. One boy, Dave, is picked at random and hauled off in a nondescript sedan. Shortly thereafter, the others, Jimmy and Sean, learn that the men weren’t cops. When Dave emerges, after days of torture, he’s marked as what an onlooker calls “damaged goods.”
The three friends will grow apart until another crime of stolen youth—the murder of a 19-year-old girl—binds them together 25 years later. Sean is now the investigating detective, and Jimmy, an ex-con with a vicious past, happens to be the dead girl’s father. And Dave, now a secretive, stoop-shouldered husband and father, looks like a suspect even to his tremulous wife. As Jimmy’s underworld posse shadows Sean’s leads, the manhunt exposes an entire community of damaged goods.
As director, Eastwood details that community so vividly, you feel the weight of its amassed guilt and tangled loyalties in your bones. Everything’s too close, including the proximity of innocence to evil. Bad men stand blankly at a church communion, and a parent plays whiffleball with hands that only recently were covered in blood. It’s old news that Eastwood has spent his directorial career challenging and complicating the code of vengeance. But the sense of threat and corruption here is heavier, more pervasive than in his earlier movies. In the neighborhood’s history, every act of retribution ripples for years afterward, capsizing the blameless and guilty alike.
If the movie’s moral complexity sometimes recalls The Godfather, so does the brilliance of its ensemble. As the swaggering Jimmy, Sean Penn has the flashiest part, and he fills it with the kind of physical specificity Brando brought to his greatest roles. By contrast, Tim Robbins’ Dave is a fearlessly pathetic creation: a man whose weakness brings out the strength in bullies. His scenes with Penn are marvels of reactive give-and-take. As Sean, Kevin Bacon has the dullest of the lead roles, but his quiet, anguished decency holds the many outsized performances together.
Eastwood’s greatest failing as a director is a tendency to overreach or underline the obvious: When he fumbles for operatic overhead shots, inserts needless flashbacks or ladles his own gummy score over the images, he undercuts the effectiveness of his skill with actors. But Mystic River’s flaws are outweighed by its emotional force. As a tapestry of themes Eastwood’s spent a career exploring, from imperiled innocence to the lawman’s blurry role as defender or dispenser of justice, this would have the ring of finality if it didn’t end on such an ambiguous note of seething anger. Eastwood concludes with a final parade sequence whose wormy, corny Americana is both sincere and sincerely corrupted. After sampling almost every kind, depth and texture of screen darkness in Mystic River, the former Dirty Harry saves the darkest void of all for the sunglasses over a vigilante’s untroubled eyes—surrounded, in a chillingly resonant image, by hundreds of waving flags.
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