Clint Eastwood's Mystic River: Post-Mortem
Published October 21, 2003
Overall you feel Eastwood doesn't get the material at either the high or the low end. He respects this material far beyond its deserts but there is such a thing as behaving too respectfully. In fact, the only scene that has any snap is the one that resembles melodrama, when Dave outplays the cops who have brought him in for questioning and comes across as pretty creepy. Otherwise, the Jimmy and Dave story seems like a botched version of Fritz Lang's suspense classic M (1931) in which Peter Lorre plays a man who abducts, rapes, and murders little girls. The police, desperate to catch him, put a dragnet over the entire town. This disrupts underworld activity to such an extent the criminals start investigating on their own and at the climax are holding a kangaroo-court trial (in which Lorre's confession reveals the desperation of a psychotic killer more piercingly than any other movie ever has) when the police bust in and take the pathetic killer into the official legal system.
In Mystic River Eastwood wouldn't dare make Dave guilty of Katie's death, as Lang did, because then he wouldn't be sympathetic. But he does expect us to sympathize with Jimmy, apparently unaware that we could understand him without liking him if the script had a more sophisticated shape. M is structured to run on the irony of the parallel systems of detection. In Mystic River we have the Savage brothers investigating Katie's death at the same time that Sean and his partner are tracking down witnesses and evidence, but Eastwood drops and picks up these strands according to no discernible narrative pattern. Even without making the elements that lead to Dave's murder fit together in a way that bears some significance, we would respond more if Dave's murder came at the climax of a suspenseful back-and-forth between the cops and thugs. All I felt was relief that this movie, which I swear plays out in longer-than-real time, must nearly be over.
You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.
Alan Dale is author of Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.
- Clint Eastwood's Mystic River: Post-Mortem
- Published: October 21, 2003
- Type:
- Section: Video
- Filed Under: Video: Drama, Video: Suspense and Mystery, Video: Urban
- Writer: Alan Dale
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Comments on this articleComments
This is one the most fatuous, intellectually pretentious reviews of a movie or a novel I have ever seen. The review is also notable for its numerous slurs aimed at the director and actors.
The movie of course makes sense in its own frame of reference. Among other things, it suggests that a traditonal pattern of morality may still exist among people who are outside the pale of conventional institutionalized morality.
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Apparently, you blogs have no more knowledge of molestation than hogs. Forget the tangled interweaving of plot, the grimness of it all, etc. It's a realistically symbolic rendition of the sequelae ("consequences" to you) for many molested kids. They carry it with them forever, and, as a group, die younger than actuarial probabilities for the population-at-large.
It's called "soul murder" by CSA (Child Sexual Abuse) experts. And that's what this film is all about. So stuff all that poppycock where the sun don't shine when you know nothing of the subject you are critiquing.
Respectfully,
Leila