Mystic River Movie Review:


Synopsis:

“We bury our sins, we wash them clean”

Adapted from a best – selling novel, this is a tale of complex emotional ties and moral boundaries, directed by Oscar winning Eastwood, and also sports a tantalising cast.

Penn plays Jimmy, a man who is reunited with two of his friends, Sean, (Bacon) and Dave (Robbins), in sombre circumstances following the death of his daughter.
Sean is also a detective assigned to the case of the girl’s death, whom not only has to deal with the disturbing evidence he uncovers but has to quell Jimmy’s overwhelming sadness and desire for revenge.

There seems to be a trend in all Clint Eastwood directed films that don’t star the iconic actor. Starting in 1973’s “Breezy”, Eastwood really began to explore with the camera as just a director. With a gap of 15 years, Eastwood returned to sole-directing with 1988’s “Bird” where he found a new depth and ability to move an audience with subtly. His next sole-project was 1997’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil” where he explored a darker theme and found a better connection between director and actor. Each of these projects had their statements and exploration but each didn’t have wide market appeal. Eastwood’s latest sole-project is a lot like those predecessors.

A neighborhood is like a family. For three boys, Jimmy, Dave and Sean, it was their life until one fateful day where their friendship changed forever. Twenty-five years later, the three men are brought back together when Jimmy’s (Sean Penn) daughter is viciously murdered. Jimmy’s childhood friend Sean (Kevin Bacon), now a detective, heads the murder investigation that could lead to their friend Dave (Tim Robbins). Sean must keep distraught Jimmy at bay long enough to secure Dave’s innocence. Time is running out.

“Mystic River” follows in the foot-steps of sole-Eastwood directorial projects in that Eastwood is learning as he hones his directing skills. “Mystic River” uses a lot of what Eastwood has learned. He brings out breath-taking performances in both Penn and Robbins as well as stellar supporting performances from both Marcia Gay Harden and Laura Linney. He also capitalizes on the darkness and heart-wrenching he has built from previous projects. Eastwood however is still learning how to sculpt a film. There are a lot of scenes that let the viewer wander and his ending is left to the imagination of the audience which was very sour for my taste. In a harrowing crime drama you don’t want to left to your own devices upon its conclusion. Can you imagine if great crime dramas had endings like that? If “Law & Order” was like that I would throw things at the TV.

What needs to be addressed and heralded when watching this film is how much Eastwood has been able to evoke emotion in his actors. Sean Penn’s performance in this film is a landmark for the actor’s career. His pain and crying out is utterly heart-wrenching. He is a marvel. Then you have Robbins and his subtle and subdued but disturbed performance that puts you on the edge of your seat. He is also brilliant. Then when you put Kevin Bacon beside these amazing performances you have to admire the actor for taking a more subtle role to his fellow stars.

I feel that this film could have been so much better but I also have to blame screenwriter Brian Helgeland whose script needed some structure polishing. The floundering screenwriter needs a break and this film isn’t it.

As I have said about Eastwood sole-projects that each one is a learning experience for the director. “Mystic River” shows just how close Eastwood is to honing his directorial eye. When all his elements do come together it will be a mind-boggling achievement in film.

(4 out of 5)

So Says the Soothsayer

Dean Kish

“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 oen 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.

Sara Michelle Fetters

From the opening shot we know we're in the hands of a master filmmaker, guiding us carefully and expertly through a story that's chilling and deeply moving.

After a brief prologue we jump ahead 25 years in this Boston-Irish neighbourhood, where the effects of child abuse have grown festering under the surface until they once again engulf three childhood pals: Jimmy (Penn) is now a shop-owner with a strong-willed wife (Linney), plunged into grief when their daughter is murdered.

Sean (Bacon) is now a cop called in to investigate with his partner (Fishburne). And Dave (Robbins) is still haunted by his past, so much so that his wife (Harden) begins to suspect that something may be amiss. As the police investigation continues, these three men discover the strengths and limits of their childhood bond. And they're forced to make decisions with lasting repercussions.

There's a slow-burn intensity to this film that's nearly unbearable; Eastwood creates the mood early on and never lets up for a second, piling insinuation upon suspicion and letting the audience's intelligence connect the dots. This is mature, meaningful, thoroughly grown-up filmmaking that has something vitally important to say about the expanding effects of violence in society.

Everything is layered and complex, from Eastwood's subtle-yet-telling direction and Helgeland's marvellous screenplay to brilliant production design and intense performances. It's hard to pick a standout from the actors--Penn's bristling grief, Bacon's conflicted steeliness, Robbins' jittery anguish, Linney's burning rage, Harden's brittle intuition.

Even the minor characters light up the screen meaningfully in a fiercely well-plotted tale of a community that's increasingly unable to deal with lies, repression and guilt. Yes, this is a seriously gruelling film that works as a twisty murder mystery and then leaves us gasping for breath at its unsettling epilogue.

The only false note is a concluding flashback involving Robbins' character; it feels obvious and condescending, and ties up one subplot far too neatly. Otherwise, this is a film that's unafraid to dig deeply into its characters and into the past, regardless of what it might unearth there.

A real stunner.

Rich Cline

Childhood friends Jimmy (Penn), Sean (Bacon) and Dave (Robbins) had drifted apart after they went through a truly horrific event. Years later the three are brought together after the murder of Jimmy’s daughter Katie (Rossum). Sean is the lead investigator in the case and Dave’s wife Celeste (Gay Harden) offers comfort to her cousin Annabeth (Linney), Jimmy’s wife. Sean has a few leads in the case but Jimmy is starting his own neighbourhood investigation, as he wants swift retribution.

Clint Eastwood makes a return to directorial form with a slow paced, multi-layered thriller that will leave you guessing until the very end.

Based on the novel by Dennis Lehane, this is the story of three childhood friends driven apart by a traumatic event that would shape the rest of their lives. Three stories run parallel, interweaving to advance the plot and reveal more of the mystery but throw up constant red herrings and misdirection, to keep you gripped to the events unfolding on screen.

Eastwood has brought together a top-notch cast to bring this tense novel to life. Three of the best actors in the 40+ generation grace the screen and make the movie all that more believable. Sean Penn gives another tour-de-force performance as the grieving father Jimmy. At first you are drawn into his loss, thinking that he is little more than a simple shop owner, struck by tragedy but he is much more than that. This is testament to Penn’s ability to breathe life into a character, giving him so many layers and unknowns that you never know where he is going or what he is going to do next. The very underrated Kevin Bacon moves away from his usual villainous roles to give a very assured and understated performance as Sean. Charged with investigating his friend’s daughter’s murder, Bacon expresses the character’s conflicting emotions superbly as he battles with his personal feelings about the situation and doing his job. Playing Dave, Tim Robbins takes the character to the edge of darkness as he tries to come to terms with events from the past and present. He shows again what a good character actor he is, as we see Dave fall into the precipice he had be balancing on the edge of for so many years.

The three principal actors make the movie worth watching alone but Eastwood has surrounded them with great support. Laurence Fishburne is the voice of reason in the investigation as Sean’s partner Whitey. Marcia Gay Harden proves that her Oscar win wasn’t a one off with a powerful performance as Dave’s troubled wife. Laura Linney’s role, while limited, is an important one and she tries and justifies the action that Jimmy has taken. Young actors Emmy Rossum, Tom Guiry and Spencer Treat Clark as also very well cast and hold their own amongst their very renowned peers.

The pacing of the movie is very slow and methodical, which could be off putting to some viewers but this is the film’s strength. Plot revelations and case discoveries are given to your gradually making the ending very hard to predict. This really gets you thinking and as you formulate one theory, the story takes another twist, throwing you in a completely different direction. This testament to the excellent source novel and the sterling screenplay by Brian Helgeland as the movie has you hooked from the first reel.

Mystic River is a superbly acted, beautifully directed thriller that shows again what a great filmmaker Clint Eastwood can be. While its slow pace and unnecessarily extended finale might not be to everyone’s liking, this is still a first rate, emotion filled thriller.

Star Rating = * * * *

Jamie Kelwick

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