The most impressive thing was the cast.

Rating: 8/10 (18 February 2004)

Before I go on, I should mention that Mystic River is an outstandingly well-made movie. I saw it months after it was released, after it had been acclaimed one of the best movies of the year, and after it had officially been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. So I guess I just expected more, especially from Clint Eastwood, one of the greatest living stars of the cinema. That being said, I can appreciate it being hailed as one of the best pictures of 2003, it definitely was, but I was bothered that Big Fish wasn't nominated for Best Picture BEFORE I saw this movie. And I'm sorry to all you Eastwood/Penn/Fishburne/ Linney/Robbins/Bacon/etc fans out there, but Big Fish was better.
I was immensely impressed with the cast in this movie. For the first half hour or so, almost every scene introduced another well-known and enormously talented actor. Lawrence Fishburne proves that he has not been typecast as Morpheus (thank God), Sean Penn delivers yet another smashing performance as a man desperately trying to cope with his emotions, which have been scattered out of control, I was shocked at Tim Robbins' incredible ability to completely transform his voice to one with a Boston accent (this is one of the most difficult things for a well-known actor to do), Kevin Bacon makes an outstanding detective (he's one of the most versatile actors working today, regardless of how much you like or dislike him), and Laura Linney gives a performance that is interesting in that it is hugely effective but she still seems to be holding something back. Even while you're seeing her perform this role with amazing skill, you can tell that she is an even better actor than you're seeing.
(spoilers) Essentially, Mystic River is a murder mystery. Robbins, Bacon, and Penn play the parts of Dave, Sean, and Jimmy, three kids who grew up in the same neighborhood (two on the same street) but grew apart as they got older (grew apart, that is, in contact, not so much in proximity). The film begins with them carving their names into wet cement when a black car comes along and a man gets out, pretending to be a police officer. Sean and Jimmy live on that very street, so they are let go, but Dave lives across the neighborhood, so he has to get into the car to be taken home. It's not long after that car stops that you know it's not really a police officer (even back then their cars were never that filthy), and so Dave is kidnapped and, while it's never explicitly mentioned in the movie what happened to him beyond that he was held in a dirty basement for four hours, the unnecessary hints are more than enough.
What I like about the murder mystery that comes later is that Dave has such a concrete mental reason for committing the murder that he did. It's understandable that he might have gotten scared and not come out and admitted what he did, but I would have thought that he would at least have told his wife what really happened. She was obviously not going to turn him in, given the extent to which she went to cover up her beating of what he claimed to be a mugger. Meanwhile, the same night, Jimmy's 19-year-old daughter has been shot and beaten to death in another part of the city, and Sean is the detective assigned to the case, along with his curiously named partner, Whitey Powers (Lawrence Fishburne). Hopefully there's no subtle meaning to what happens when you remove the last letters of his first and last name.
What Eastwood constructs from this outline is a tense thriller that comes to a tense conclusion that, I think, is just a little too similar to the tense conclusion of his outstanding 1999 film True Crime. Sean, Dave, and Jimmy have interestingly all grown into fairly unhappy or at least spotty lives, Jimmy as the owner of the corner store (closely watching over his 19-year-old daughter), Dave as a handyman with deep emotional scars from his childhood, and Sean as the homicide detective with the nutcase of a wife who keeps calling and then not saying anything. Jimmy's daughter is dating a boy named Brendan, who Jimmy viciously disapproved of, and he is asked at several points in the movie why he dislikes the boy so much, and he can't really answer, because he has no reason. He dislikes the boy so much because the screenplay needs him to.
Each of the actors is given at least one scene where their acting abilities are tested, and mostly all of them do remarkably well. It's kind of disappointing to learn that Sean Penn is just as incapable of doing crying scenes as Jack Nicholson proved that he also is in Something's Gotta Give (indeed, Tom Guiry, who played Brendan, performed his crying scene much better than Penn did). I think Penn is more skilled as a man who is struggling with his emotions and the chaos in his life, illustrated through the lines on his forehead and the vacant look in his eyes. Actually crying is a little too forward for him.
So now that I've made my superficial complaint, I think that the main reason that I don't think Mystic River deserves the massive Oscar buzz that it has generated, besides the fact that Big Fish is better by leaps and bounds, is because underneath all the big names and impressive production value, it is really a pretty simple detective story. Sean and Whitey (Bacon and Fishburne), as the lead investigators working on the case of Jimmy's missing daughter, spend the majority of their scenes together acting like bumbling B-movie detectives, speaking to each other as though they have to explain everything they say to the other person. They're both detectives, right? So why do they constantly have to explain to each other why certain theories and possibilities won't work? The vast majority of their conversations with each other in respect to the case are so obviously contrived that it's almost like they're reading cue cards, and I happen to know that they are each better actors than to do something like that. That's just shoddy writing.
Sean's wife also plays a rather obscure and unnecessary role. Sure, she represents the chaos that has befallen Sean's life, as well as the order that ultimately follows (conveniently when the case is solved), but the symbolism is so shallow and textbook that the movie would have been better off without it. If anything, they could have had her start actually talking to her some other time than the exact minute that Sean discovers the last remnants of the mystery still lurking beneath the surface of the screenplay. Jimmy admits what he did, Sean's face registers the understandable shock, and his phone rings. Cute.
And while I'm at it, I might as well mention that, by the time the case is solved, Sean has been working on it too hard and for too long to simply let Jimmy walk away at the end, chugging his bottle of Jack Daniel's as he walks down the street, having admitted to killing Dave. It really bothered me that he was willing to just let him walk away like that (sure, he lost his daughter and was an old friend, but he also killed their other old friend. Was Sean just going to let that go?). The only reason that I can think of for doing this was a pretty effective shot that came later during a parade downtown. Dave's wife can be seen wandering the crowd aimlessly, Sean is there with his own family, and as he looks into the crowd across the street, he sees Jimmy surrounded by his usual hoodlums, the ones who had been conducting his own tragically misled investigation of his daughter's murder. As Sean looks at Jimmy, he makes a gun with his fingers and points it at Jimmy, I suppose indicating that he plans to take him down in the future (or maybe just saying hi, imagine the same gesture with a wink, for example), to which Jimmy responds by spreading his hands and raising his eyebrows as if to say, `What are you gonna do?'
I love the way Jimmy looks in this shot. He's matured in the few moments since we last saw him. Years have been added to his life, he has noticeably changed. His new confidence and his new experience and the way he sits, is dressed, and carries himself indicate that he has become a different person.

He's become a godfather.