So-so

Rating: 5/10 (14 September 2008)

It is a truism in the world of soap opera (the purest form of modern melodrama) that the characters must always do the dumbest possible thing to propel the story forward. While this is not egregious in melodrama, it is so in drama. Yet, a large portion of film today is pure melodrama. I think of highly lauded films like Michael Mann's Heat as melodrama incarnate.
Another truism in regard to films is that actors turned directors tend to not be very good. Mel Gibson, Ron Howard, and Kevin Costner (Academy Award winners in direction) come to mind, as does Clint Eastwood (another Oscar winner). Perhaps the only actor-cum-director who has proved his chops artistically, though, is Woody Allen, although he was really a stand up comedian, not an actor. Actors tend to direct very ham-handedly, with static camera work, and no real sense of film's visual aspect, and even less skill at understanding what constitutes good story structure. Eastwood is very much in this vein. In his highly lauded Mystic River Eastwood shows that he has everything it takes to direct TV movies of the week, but not serious art. This film is larded with poorly framed scenes, bad lighting, very pedestrian angles, color-strained, as well as bad performances, a horridly unrealistic script, banal music, and too many red herringsÂ…. There are some nice touches- like abused Dave's name drying half-finished in the cement, but they are too little in depth and too few. More often the script, by Brian Helgeland, merely allows wallowing for the actors, and denies them any real chance to show real emotion. Like the poor In The Bedroom, Mystic River had a chance to be an adult meditation on grief, rather than a plot reject from a 1970s cop TV show like Kojack or Starsky And Hutch.
The basic problem is that most moviegoers simply do not understand nor appreciate good writing- everything is homogenized down into a lowest common denominator plot mulch. I've read other critics state that Eastwood is a jazzy director, in that he tends to just riff. Well, maybe so in other films but in this one he's at his Director's 101 worst. The film is dull and predictable, and the acting is forgettable- certainly not indelible. You know this when there is nothing unique about a performance and any other actor could have pulled off the part. So it is with the three main characters.