Mystic River does not represent Clint Eastwood's first Academy Award nomination for Best Director and it wasn't his last. It also was not his first or last nomination for Best Picture. Although Mystic River didn't win either of those awards – it did capture an acting award for Sean Penn and a supporting actor award for Tim Robbins – some would argue it may be Eastwood's finest work.
The film, which is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, stars the aforementioned Robbins and Penn as well as Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne, Marcia Gay Harden (who was also nominated for an Academy Award for her role), and Laura Linney. It is a great cast and all the members of it are well up to the task given them. Mystic River is an incredibly dark movie, one which starts with the abduction and sexual abuse of a young boy, Dave Boyle, and then picks up the story years later when the boy is grown (and now played by Tim Robbins) and has continued to suffer the after-effects of what happened to him.
Boyle still lives in the same neighborhood as does one of his childhood friends, Jimmy Markum (Penn), but the third member of their trio, Sean Devine (Bacon), has moved on to bigger and better things, joining the Massachusetts State Police. When Jimmy's oldest daughter is found murdered, it is Sean and his partner, Whitey Powers (Fishburne), who are called in to investigate.
Taking place in a strictly working class neighborhood, Mystic River is a noir film that pulls no punches. It focuses itself on its three main characters and the different paths their lives have taken from that first scene where Dave gets abducted. It is that moment that sets the tone for the movie and that moment which forever alters the lives of the characters. Jimmy, an ex-con, owns a convenience store; Dave is an undefined, but clearly low-level, blue collar worker; Sean, while he has managed to escape the neighborhood, has not grown past the events of the past as his being a police officer is a response to the fact that one of the men who abducted Dave did so while posing as a plainclothes officer. All of the characters in the story, not just the three men, have led difficult lives, not ones that they are necessarily unhappy with, but difficult nonetheless.
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