October 3, 2003 | Like some piercingly melancholy, way-past-midnight riff of jazz piano, Mystic River can chill you to the bone even while it breaks your heart. Its setting is a working-class Boston neighborhood of close-knit families and triple-decker houses – but its story has the inexorable drive and cumulative impact of ancient tragedy. Indeed, as this richly textured and uncommonly compelling drama spins its dark magic, it achieves the Aristotelian ideal of evoking pity and terror in its spellbound audience.
Easily the most ambitious film Clint Eastwood has directed since his Oscar-winning Unforgiven (1992), Mystic River begins with an act of monstrous evil – all the more horrible because it seems so arbitrary, so inexplicable – then proceeds to show how, relentlessly, that calamity continues to shape and twist lives and destinies.
On a fateful afternoon in 1975, two men drive onto a street where three boys — Dave Boyle, Jimmy Markum and Sean Devine — are playing street hockey. They drive away with Dave in the back seat. Eventually, the abducted youngster escapes his captors. But Dave can never really escape what has been done to him and, worse, neither can his two friends.
A quarter-century passes, and we find the boys have grown into adulthood without moving very far from the scene of the crime. Sean (Kevin Bacon) is a homicide detective for the Massachusetts State Police, maybe – the movie doesn’t announce, merely hints – because he wants to avenge violent crimes. Jimmy (Sean Penn) is an ex-convict who has walked the straight and narrow ever since his first wife died while he was in prison. (At least, that’s his story, and he’s sticking to it.) He operates a corner grocery with Katie (Emmy Rossum), his beloved 19-year-old daughter, and Annabeth (Laura Linney), his supportive second wife.
And Dave (Tim Robbins)? Haunted and hesitant, he’s a soft-spoken fellow with a wan smile, a stoop-shouldered gait – and, especially when he walks his young son to the school bus each morning, a watchful, wary eye. Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden), Dave’s wife, is almost as skittish as her husband. And her anxiety escalates into mounting dread after Dave comes home late one night, dazed and stained with someone else’s blood. He claims he grappled with a knife-wielding mugger. She wants to believe him. The next morning, however, Katie is found murdered in a neighborhood park.
Celeste can’t help suspecting the worst. Unfortunately, she shares those suspicions with Jimmy.
On its simplest level, Mystic River – which screenwriter Brian Hegeland ( L.A. Confidential ) adapted, with scrupulous fidelity, from a gripping novel by Dennis Lehane – is a murder mystery. While Sean and his partner (Laurence Fishburne) dutifully gather clues and interrogate witnesses, Jimmy and two former partners in crime conduct their own inquiry as prelude to claiming blood for blood.
But the secrets uncovered by both investigations are sufficiently damning to implicate almost everyone involved. No one gets off easily here, not even the film’s director. The savagely ironic conclusion, propelled by the toxic commingling of guilt and rage, can be read as Eastwood’s pointed critique of the vigilante spirit celebrated in many of his own action flicks 20 and 30 years ago.
All of the performances in Mystic River are so extraordinary, it feels somehow unfair to single out individuals for special praise. But, then again, since the movie itself underscores the unfairness of life, I suppose I can say that Penn and Robbins are first and second among equals. More important, I can state without reservation that Mystic River is the first movie of 2003 with a legitimate claim to greatness.
