I am utterly mystified by the overwhelmingly positive reviews of Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, which has been called a "historic achievement" and compared to Greek tragedy. The critics have clearly responded to the ambitions of Brian Helgeland's script (adapted from Dennis Lehane's novel) and Eastwood's direction rather than to what's on the screen: Mystic River is the drabbest, most monotonously solemn and yet ungainly "masterpiece" imaginable. The movie has especially been praised for getting the feel of the neighborhood in which the action takes place, but there's not a soul in it who doesn't trudge around as if aware of the impressive tale being told. (Ice Cube's variety show classic Friday (1995) has an infinitely more detailed sense of neighborhood life, with its patchwork of pleasures and disasters.) The story doesn't make much sense but the moviemaking is so flatfooted it hardly matters.
I don't know what exactly triggered critics to rate this movie so highly but I do know that I haven't read a sensible analysis of the narrative, and without that you can't assess its pretensions to tragedy. (Stephanie Zacharek's piece on Salon sees Eastwood's limitations as a moviemaker and makes the best case for his sensitivity to the material, but still wildly overrates the experience of the movie.) This means, of course, that there's no way to attack the movie's pretensions except by giving the story away: so this will be a review in the form of a post-mortem (i.e., all spoilers).
In a prologue set in 1975 three Irish-American boys are writing their names in wet cement in a working-class section of Boston. Two pedophiles pretending to be cops take Dave, the gawkiest, weakest-appearing among them, away in their car, supposedly to tell his mother about this act of vandalism. Instead they molest him for four days until he manages to escape. We then see the three boys grown up: Jimmy (Sean Penn) is an ex-con who owns a corner grocery store and dotes on the oldest of his three daughters; Dave (Tim Robbins) is a shambling near-wreck, who tries to instill more confidence in his small son than he ever had; Sean (Kevin Bacon) is a homicide detective whose pregnant wife has walked out on him but continues to call him, though she can't bring herself to say anything when he answers. The men are brought into close contact again for the first time since childhood when Jimmy's favorite daughter Katie is found murdered.
The night of the murder Dave comes home with a slash across his belly and blood on his hands. His creepmouse wife Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden) accepts his story of having murdered a mugger in self-defense and cleans up the evidence. The audience knows that Dave saw Katie dancing on a local bartop with her girlfriends and the only reason we don't think he must have killed her is because that would be too obvious. But Dave keeps changing the story of how his hands got torn up and he seems to be undergoing a crisis remembering his escape from his rapists. He cannot, however, explain what he's feeling and so is kind of scary. Eventually Celeste becomes so frightened she moves out and confides her fears to Jimmy. Jimmy has the Savage Brothers, two local thugs who take orders from him, drive Dave out to a riverfront bar for drinks. When Jimmy shows up, wearing black gloves, he scares a confession out of Dave by saying that if Dave will admit what he did he'll let him live.
Article comments
1 - Leila
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
2 - W. C. Parker, Jr. Ph.D.
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.
3 - Sara
In your review, you critique Eastwood and claim that he is too literal. However, I think you are the one that is being too literal in this interpretation of this movie. If you just read between the lines a little bit, you would see how the complexities by which Eastwood guides the audience's mind from being suspicious Dave to being sympathetic to his plight, and from feeling nothing but remorse for Jimmy to disappointment and disgust at how far he will go (all without investigating). I don't think that Eastwood was trying to make Jimmy the "good guy" at all, not even with Annabeth's speech. I viewed the entire ending as a giant, tragic irony, in the fact that the audience assumes that there is meaning behind a crime that turns out to be meaningless; there is irony when we learn that an innocent (well innocent of Katie's murder at least) and deeply vulnerable man was senselessly killed because of Jimmy's (in addition to the audience's) assumption of the significance of Katie's murder; and there is deep tragedy in the fact that no one bothered to understand the man that got stuck in the middle - Dave.
I will admit, the accents got schticky, and Annabeth's character development occurred at an odd time, but I think there is a great deal of melodrama in this film, and perhaps the only reason you did not notice it is because you are guilty of exactly that which you accuse Eastwood of doing - taking the plot too literally. If you just explored the subtleties, the poignancy of this film would resonate with you.
Thank you,
Sara