Clint Eastwood Delivers a Taut, Tough, Burning Morality Play

Rating: 10/10 (19 October 2003)

A good morality play shouldn't end with a maxim. It should leave those watching it troubled and questioning and, perhaps, pointed in a good if not a right direction.
Taking Dennis Lehane's novel of the same name, director Clint Eastwood has, with "Mystic River," blazed through issues of love, loyalty, responsibility and the dilemma of unshakable experiences that haunt not only those who experienced them but that reach into the next generation.
At the beginning of "Mystic River" three boys, not yet teens, play a street game and then divert to carve their names into just hardening sidewalk cement. A car stops and an almost obviously bogus cop berates the kids before ordering one into his car. Without explicit depiction, flashbacks clearly show that Dave, the abducted boy, was sexually brutalized before escaping.
Fast forward to the present in a dreary, near-Boston, blue collar neighborhood hard by the Mystic River. Dave (Tim Robbins) is married to Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden) and they have a little boy who is as devoted to his dad as the father is to him. Dave doesn't smile much, he sort of shuffles, his mind and body the unwilling curators of indelible indecencies experienced in early life.
Jimmy (Sean Penn) runs a corner candy and variety store, his days of serving time for robbery long past. Is he reformed? One wonders as his life unfolds. Jimmy is married to Annabeth (Laura Linney). They have three daughters and before the film gets very far the oldest, Katie, is brutally murdered. A departure from the usual plot, she clearly isn't the victim of a sex crime. A senseless murder?
Laura Linney starts as an apparently average, not too interesting spouse. In one scene near the end of the film she unleashes an emotional passion that brings the moral quagmire of Jimmy's actions to a boil.
Returning to the tried and true theme of boys growing up in a tough place and one becomes a cop while the others lead ordinary but hopefully not criminal lives, Sean (Kevin Bacon) is a Massachusetts State Police homicide detective who works with his partner, Whitey (Laurence Fishburne). Sean's the one of the trio who went to college.
As the story unfolds the detectives, having made a simple but crucial mistake, search for the killer while Jimmy, clearly a capo in the hood, starts his own inquiry, one somewhat less restrained by law than that of the police.
Dave emerges as a suspect not only for the police but to his increasingly confused and distraught wife. She confides in Jimmy, not knowing that his announced plan for the killer, if he finds him, does not include turning that person over to his old friend, Sean.
So much for the plot. What is portrayed here are some of the most angry and tortured expressions in recent film. Sean Penn invests his role with a range running from tenderness to anguish to methodical and cold calculation. Initially sympathetic because of his loss, his character's increasing complexity calls for viewers to try to understand a personality that has also been ravaged by decades of a troubled life.
Marcia Gay Harden gives a haunting performance as a loyal wife whose suspicions lead her to do something she must know erodes her loyalty to Dave and whose consequences slowly dawn on her. A stellar performance.
Bacon and Fishburne make a good cop team.
There's a clue, fairly early in the film, as to what happened to Katie. I won't reveal it and I suspect ninety percent, at least, of the audience in a packed theater missed it.
A little boy on a parade float at the end of the film painfully shows how the cycle of evil and loss experienced by one generation infects the young of the next. That scene shook me up.
"Mystic River" is a certain Oscar contender. Clint Eastwood also composed some of the score but he deserves enormous credit for using music sparingly. This is a drama that would have been very damaged by an intrusive musical presence.
10/10.