Very well-directed and well-acted, but the script is flat

Rating: Null/10 (21 July 2008)

Dennis Lehane's "Mystic River" is unquestionably flawed as a novel, with many long passages of indulgent, unnecessary, and not very good prose taking away from the detailed characters and intricate plotting. It is, therefore, a perfect novel to turn into a film, as the film could focus on the characters, story, and thematic content. In the hands of a director as great as Clint Eastwood, with a cast perfectly suited for the material, I expected more than I got from "Mystic River", a movie that is never boring but never becomes anything more than passable as a script. The screenplay by Brian Helgeland is completely flat and lacking in confident handling of the themes and ideas present in Lehane's novel, with Dave Boyle's character reduced to little more than a cliché, and the central theme of the character reduced to two or three unbelievably predictable scenes.
"Mystic River" is a long movie, but it still feels rushed. Helgeland is simply poor at adapting literature, as he chooses to pack in as much of the novel's labyrinthine plot into the film, forsaking the much more important character development necessary for the plot to be interesting. Perhaps it's just me, but I would much rather see this trend of trying to be 'faithful' to a novel when adapting it by simply including as much of the plot as usual. That's not the case. I don't even care if Helgeland wrote this as a straightforward thriller, forsaking all the character development and thematic content of the novel. What he has done here is that he has written a character-centric drama with flat, uninteresting characters, and the film simply does not work as a result. It works as passable entertainment, but it is also very frustrating.
I cannot fault "Mystic River" on a technical level. Clint Eastwood is among the best living directors, and this film is handled very well by him and his crew. Photographer Tom Stern's work is outstanding and the sound work here is also very good. Eastwood's score is certainly worth mentioning, a CD I enjoy a lot and actually listened to many times well before I saw this film. The film thankfully moves at a decent pace, keeping it from being as boring as reading Helgeland's script surely would be. The acting is excellent, although I thought Sean Penn was among the less impressive members of the cast.
A film severely flawed as a result of its flat, bland screenplay, "Mystic River" is worth seeing if you are a fan of the cast or director, but it is certainly far from being the great film it so easily could have been.
6/10