The movie is weirdly distended. Every scene plays out with the same drawn-out rhythm, as if Eastwood were willing to wait all day for the important details, and yet there aren't enough details to make sense of the characters and their relationships. Harden's performance is touching and relatively precise, but we need more information. Does Celeste suspect what Jimmy will do once she unburdens herself of her suspicions? Is she trying to get rid of Dave in a passive way she won't feel responsible for? Sometimes you do get intriguing information, but too late. Jimmy's wife Annabeth (Laura Linney), for instance, gives a Lady Macbeth speech after she's figured out what Jimmy has done to Dave--the last five minutes of the movie is an odd time to be establishing her character. Is her push supposed to have influenced Jimmy in bringing his investigation to a brutal and inaccurate conclusion? Is she compensating for the fact that he loved the daughter of his first wife best? (In its own terms this big speech doesn't even make sense. She tells Jimmy that everyone is weak except them and that he could rule this town. He owns a corner grocery store--what the hell is she talking about? Is this supposed to be a forecast of the future or merely a transparent justification of Jimmy's crime? Is she really a schemer or just afraid that remorse might make him confess and take the prop of her family back to prison?)

Eastwood handles the story in the most literal-minded way. The one thing I'll say for the movie is that it isn't a melodrama, that is, it's not just a story of innocent victims and black-souled villains. It tries to approach a goon like Jimmy objectively, but Eastwood and Helgeland lack the literary culture to pull it off. Mystic River aspires to tragedy though it proceeds by a particularly sludgy naturalism; what it achieves is a grim and misshapen set of interconnected anecdotes. The movie is a nearly unendurable sit because there's no rhythmic variation and not one moment of lightness in these people's lives. I've never been to a funeral where people didn't crack jokes; the misery among people who seem genetically unequipped for levity, much less happiness, is not very dramatic. These working-class characters are treated as victims, not in a tragic, or Marxist, sense but because it's literarily impressive in some vague way the makers think of as "tragic."

Eastwood's lameness as a director is most evident in his work with the young actors, in the opening scene especially, where the boys might as well be wearing masks. Despite the pedestrian direction the adult actors are all pros and can more than take care of themselves. They respond with as much power as generates Oscar buzz without totally abandoning discipline. (If there's a scowling-growling-and-yowling competition any time soon, Penn should get a lifetime achievement award for this performance alone.) The only relief is inadvertent: Penn's hideous coif, which looks like a black cat nestling on his head; Robbins's reading of Dave's ineffably "poetic" account of his escape from the pedophiles; and one good laugh when maestro Eastwood's symphonic score surges as the camera pans up to the sky.