Truly amazing film without one false note or even mediocre performance

Rating: 10/10 (6 February 2005)

People shouldn't review the movie they think they are seeing, they should review the movie they are seeing.
This isn't a bleak, hopeless OR grim film. It's a movie about real people and real lives and the real situations that bind us together and tear us apart. There are no caped crusaders here...each person is explicable and even sympathetic in his/her own way. Some devices are figurative (the distant wife over the cell phone, the symbolism of which I really liked), others are literal.
Robbins' Dave is just phenomenal. Anyone who has ever been abused (or knows someone who has been) will see their own thoughts rippling through this performance. He's quite clearly still the victim...never having fully grown (as the characters say toward the end) past the events he suffered at the age of 11. The context itself is the villain.
And really, it's a film without villains or heroes. It's a movie about real people. And it has a cluster of some of the most remarkable, quiet, intelligent performances ever put to film, all riding above a fine script, and woven around an amazing directing feat.
I love this movie and recommend it unreservedly, for those who can appreciate the flawed, striving human in all of us.
For those of you who snipe at "American films", I do hope you'll include "Mystic River" in your assessments of what that phrase entails. It is a very, very American film without being Hollywoodish in the least.