Raw, unflinching storytelling from a modern master

Rating: Null/10 (5 November 2003)

Eastwood has done it again; taking the starkness of "Unforgiven" a step further, into a world where people are unforgiven for crimes they never even committed, while others bury their sins and act as if nothing ever happened. Of course, the sins don't stay buried. . .
In a story where everyone has a secret and very few things are as they seem. A mature and craggy Sean Penn (who seems to morph into Robert Deniro in this film) plays a South Boston working-class ex-con whose 19-year-old daughter is brutally murdered. In the scenes following the discovery of her body, Penn displays depths of agony and anger so real that he's sometimes difficult to watch -- but impossible to ignore. As Dave Boyle, the childhood friend whose life was destroyed by a horrific abduction and episode of sexual abuse (by a priest and another pedophile posing as a cop)Tim Robbins is heart-breaking. Shambling, gentle, vacant, and yet harboring violent tendencies that call his innocence into question, he turns in a complex and nuanced performance. Kevin Bacon, playing the third childhood friend and the only one to escape from the neighborhood -- he goes to college and becomes a detective -- is steely, appealing, and complex. There are scenes in this movie where the tension and sheer male aggression is so thick you could slice it with Penn's knife -- and he does. There are multiple threads going on in this story, and some of the loose ends aren't tied up until the very end, which is satisfying in a storytelling sense. Laura Linney takes a good turn as a crime-fanmily matriarch in the making, though Marcia Gay Harden, as Dave's wife, was a little whiny for my taste. All in all, a very fine film that raises questions about fear, sin, redemption, and the inescapable power of our pasts.