Dave, however, didn't kill Katie. The night she was killed he got bloody murdering a man he caught having sex with an underaged boy hustler in a car. Dave's confession and Jimmy's murder of him owe a debt, I imagine, to the scene in The Godfather (1972) in which Michael offers Carlo his life if he'll confess to setting Sonny up. The difference--and it's major--is that Carlo did set Sonny up. That's the kind of situation tragedy deals in: Michael's action is not entirely misplaced but he carries it out at the peril of his soul. (He is, after all, killing the father of his sister's children, and when he lies about it to his wife Kay we feel the door shut between them for good.) Michael is dispensing justice in a way we feel is brutally wrong and the implications of which are shot suggestively but made clear.
In Mystic River Jimmy is plain wrong--not just for taking the law into his own hands but in getting the wrong guy. What does the movie make of Dave's being killed for the wrong murder? Nothing. The man Dave kills isn't human in the movie's terms. Dave's killing of him is treated as an alibi, a realistic result of his molestation as a boy, and maybe an act of sanitation. The script sets up this interlocking, ongoing fiasco but doesn't push beyond the facts on the surface. There's no larger awareness of Dave's participating in a culture of violence that ironically snares him in a way he wasn't expecting and that not only isn't just but is almost comically stupid. Once you know that Dave is innocent of Katie's death, Jimmy's retributive anger seems awfully coarse, like acting--which, with Sean Penn in the role, heaven knows it is. Actually, this could have been a great way to play it, that Jimmy's paroxysms of violence come about when he feels the need to live out the role of neighborhood capo. But it doesn't appear to be in the script that way and since it's an interpretive rather than a visceral point it's not really in Eastwood's range. Instead he has Penn hit the nail square on the head, right through the flimsy board.
The killing of the wrong man in Mystic River is closer to a liberal anti-lynching movie like William Wellman's Ox-bow Incident (1943), in which the victims are innocent of the crime for which they're strung up, than it is to tragedy. The Ox-bow Incident doesn't develop its theme beyond the procedural warning that mob justice is bad because you might execute the wrong guys (a warning that doesn't differentiate lynching from state execution). Tragedy would be possible only if the lynch victims were indeed guilty, that is, by implying some balancing of justice that felt horrible and understandable at the same time. (The only potentially tragic blindness is that of the Southern major played by Frank Conroy, a man whose disgust at his son's sensitivity causes him to overplay his own masculine-martial rigor, but the movie treats him as a sadist who deserves to die.)
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