Arguably the most haunting portrait of America since "American Beauty"...

Rating: Null/10 (1 May 2004)

**SPOILERS**It is part of our humanity to contemplate the effects of a single event. For Jimmy, Dave and Sean, that event occurs early on in their lives, when they are all eleven years old. Their characters are setup from the outset: Jimmy is an adventurous kid with a love to live life on the edge; it is his brilliant idea to take a car for a spin around the block in their Boston community. When Jimmy grows up he spends two years in jail for criminal activities. Meanwhile, Sean thinks stealing the car is a bad idea. He grows up to be a cop. And then there is meek Dave, who doesn't really have much to say about anything at all. And when a so-called "cop" commands Dave to climb into the backseat of his car, he does so reluctantly, never stopping to argue. The other two kids run home to their parents and soon a search is conducted for Dave, who escapes his captors four days after being held in a cave in the middle of a large wood. We are left to merely imagine what occurs within.
When the three kids grow up into adults, not much changes. Jimmy (Sean Penn) owns a convenience store and the love of his life is his nineteen-year-old daughter, who is brutally murdered on the weekend she plans to run away with her boyfriend, the son of a crook who ratted out Jimmy and sent him to jail for those two years, and whom Jimmy sought revenge on after being let out. The close links are deliciously ironic. It doesn't help that a plot revelation reveals (spoilers ahead) that the handgun used to murder Jimmy's daughter was the same gun used by Ray Harris, his betrayer, during a liquor store shoot-out in 1984.
What follows is a grim, sometimes painful to watch, unraveling of a mystery-thriller that actually relies upon realistic characters and dialogue for backbones. Penn, who won a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal, arguably delivers the single greatest performance of his entire career. After being nicknamed the King of the Oscar Snubs, he finally received his comeuppance, and incidentally he deserves an Oscar for "Mystic River" more than ever before. His performance is, simply put, absolutely stunning. He manages to capture the essence of a grieving father. The segment in which he arrives at the scene of the crime has been hard for me to watch both times I've seen the film: Penn delivers a completely convincing, almost startlingly raw outburst that sends chills up the audience's spines. For anyone who has a loved one, it is both haunting and stirring, and an ode to the fact that if you hand an ensemble cast a great script and let them stand back and do their thing, it can sometimes turn out absolutely perfect. A lot of scenes in "Mystic River" seem as though Clint Eastwood, the director, stood back a bit and let things unravel on their own. The chemistry between the actors, and the frequently obvious ad-libbing, is something that was found in many older films but is rarer nowadays. Eastwood has rediscovered this aspect of filmmaking and I hope to see it more often in the future.
Tim Robbins' performance is somewhat more low-key, but still stellar in its own right. Robbins' character, Dave, changed when he was abducted -- after his return it is not explained that his life has never been the same, but smartly and subtly implied that something is wrong by Eastwood, and the scene in which Dave finally snaps in front of his wife -- who thinks he has murdered Jimmy's daughter after he returns home the night of the crime with blood stains and a cut hand -- is disturbing and powerful. Eastwood's gritty turn behind the camera is especially surprising given the man. To be honest I never thought that Eastwood was capable of making such a brutal film.
The most underrated performance is that by Kevin Bacon. Although Sean Penn rightfully received far more recognition for his outstanding achievement, Bacon manages to present the audience with a completely nice cop who's trying to get to the bottom of the case without hurting any friends in the process. What's so great about Bacon's performance, and what I found interesting, is that he abandoned his Bad Guy image (from "Hollow Man" to the semi-bad-kid in "Diner") and has managed to give us all a very likable, but yet also very realistic, image of a cop. He has played other "good guy" roles before but this is one of his most memorable. I've found that Bacon seems most at home when he's playing sadistic characters, and in "Mystic River," I believe it must have been a challenge for Bacon to play a nice guy. A great actor once said that he finds playing good guys much harder than bad guys, and this probably relates to Bacon's performance.
The movie is led by an all-star cast, including Laurence Fishburne as Whitey, Sean's partner, Laura Linney as Jimmy's wife, and Marcia Gay Harden as Celeste, Dave's wife. The ending of "Mystic River" had me a bit under whelmed the first time I saw it, and so less than twenty-four hours later I decided to go see it again and appreciate it even more. I came across wholly convinced that the film is one that lives up to expectations on multiple viewings, while managing to reveal a fair amount of small tidbits unnoticeable on first viewing.
"Mystic River" is Clint Eastwood's most recent directorial outing, far superior to "Blood Work," capturing the same insight into American life as "American Beauty" and containing complete, oozing remorse, something that his Oscar-winning "Unforgiven" had plenty of. The combination of these two primary elements is, simply put, an amazing film, and one of the best of 2003. If you only get to see a handful of movies from 2003, make sure to include this modern-day epic in your list.