What happened to, "My mule don't like you laughin' at him"?

Rating: 7/10 (5 October 2007)

Clint Eastwood is a remarkable guy. As he eases into and through his 70s, he's taken more chances than ever, unlike Howard Hawks and so many other artists, who repeat themselves as they age. He's explored new milieus in each of his later movies -- a Western with no heroes, women's boxing, a disappearing ethnic neighborhood, the tragedy of heroism, the social elite of an alien Southern city, an even more alien world of doomed Japanese warriors. And he's done it all with a relaxed grace on happy sets. Not all are successful but each embodies an ambiguity that's stunning. They're adult movies, made by an adult for adults. Kids aren't going to be cheering the good guys because there are no good guys.
This is the one about the kind of ethnic neighborhood in which everyone seems to know everyone else. The kind that's rapidly disappearing, in this case Boston Irish. (The New England accents are just marked enough to fall short of parodies.) Three men have grown up together, their lives interwoven in various, rather complex ways -- Kevin Bacon, Sean Penn, and Tim Robbins. Bacon has grown into a police officer. Penn is a thug who's spent time in the slams. Robbins is a tormented wretch. The story is hung on the peg of a murder. Penn's young daughter is beaten and shot to death. Bacon probes the case. Robbins, by coincidence, has been involved in a murder that has nothing to do with the death of Penn's daughter but which makes him look guilty nonetheless. Penn, a man of violence, becomes convinced of Robbin's culpability and murders him. When the true perps are revealed, Bacon realizes that Penn will never admit to the mistaken killing of their mutual friend Robbins, but Bacon will need to try pinning him for it, so the two men are now at odds with one another.
That's the plot. The real story deals with the exploration of character and of how we are shaped by events that happened long ago, events that we may not even remember with any clarity. The pacing is deliberate, the dialog naturalistic, the mistakes human in their nature, and the location shooting is realistic. (No tours of Harvard Yard or the Old North Church -- just working-class neighborhoods.) In addition to the three principals, Eastwood has assembled a fine cast that includes Marcia Gay Hardin, Eli Wallach, and Laura Linney, among others. None of them are glamorized in any way. Closeups reveal Robbin's stubble, Linney's papules, Penn's nevis, and Bacon's blemishes. But none of it comes across as cruel, any more than our looking in the mirror every morning is an act of cruelty.
I guess one of the things that's most impressive about Eastwood's articulation of these settings is that none of them was ever his own. As a child of the depression he followed his father around California, mostly working at gas stations. He's reserved and not especially articulate in interviews. His signature (which I saw on the menu of a Chinese restaurant in Monterey) is the drawling set of loops of a high school student more interested in athletics than aesthetics. A very rich man, he voted for H. Ross Perot. He was never a cowboy, never an effete homosexual snob, never a Boston Irish kid, but he manages to make these characters come alive for us. Who would have dreamed that there was an embryonic artist maturing under that shabby poncho?