Why you shouldn't try to make a good movie.

Rating: 1/10 (6 March 2004)

On the whole, Mystic River is a lot like Sean Penn's Oscar winning performance in the film. At times it is brilliant, meticulously crafted, restrained and understated - tearing at the heartstrings of viewers, simultaneously inspiring empathy and repulsion. At other times, it is overblown, overdone, overwritten, overplayed, ham-handed, difficult to buy, contrived and silly. On the rarest of occasions, it's confusing (not the plot, which attempts to spellbind, but the relevance of certain characters, scenes and unintentional laughs.) Before I saw this film, I heard that Sean Penn would be attending his first Oscar ceremony to "support Mystic River" and I witnessed Tim Robbins' wife (or girlfriend? I can proudly say I don't know) Susan Sarandon stress the social relevance and importance of the film, and vaguely alluding to her belief that it was more deserving of a "special effects thing movie" like the UTTERLY GODLIKE AND BENEVOLENT Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. LOTR: ROTK features everything that makes a movie great, except for great acting. Mystic River is sort of the opposite: the only thing that makes it a good movie are the consummate performances of Oscar winners Tim Robbins and Sean Penn. I enjoyed this movie for the acting, so I won't go into much detail about how I found these two performance flawed, they are nearly flawless. Marcia Gay Harden is pitiful - she's playing dumb, but it comes out retarded. Laura Linney, who nabbed a Best Actress nomination, for some reason, is just as bad. Kevin Bacon and Lawrence Fishburne have somehow channeled Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy from 48 Hrs. The dialogue is stilted at times - hearing an otherwise good actor like Fishburne talk about how "you can tell he's done time - they carry it in the shoulders" is just awkward and uncomfortable. There are certain scenes that recall the polished, just-the-facts ma'am quality of Helgeland's work on L.A. Confidential, but his script is immensely flawed, and this bungles some of the performances - the characters are generally underwritten. The movie has too much unnecessary dialogue, The Mrs. Devine subplot is utterly pointless, the film lacks a strong female character, and the strong male characters are too strong. The emotions secrete from these actors in brief, pained bursts. The film is restrained, but in a bad way. The subplot of the daughter going to Vegas with her boyfriend helps explain the ending (this isn't a spoiler, don't worry) but there's no explanation for why she's leaving. The climax (where "all is explained") feels scattershot and tacked on. The question remains, why is all this socially relevant? Has this story never been told before? A lot of critics think the film has a message about the patterns of violence and sexual abuse, passed down from generation to generation. This WOULD be the case, had Helgeland included in his screenplay the notion from Lehane's novel of Danny Boyle becoming a child molester as a result of his own sexual abuse - an essential part of the story, that would make it more difficult for us to feel sorry for Robbins. Is ALL of the violence in this movie portrayed as completely pointless and unfair? Yes - that isn't the case in real life. The worst offender, I'm afraid to say, is Clint Eastwood. His direction is actually quite good in a technical sense, but his camera moves too much, and pleads with the viewer to understand how tense he wants him or her to feel. His score is decent (I use that term sparingly,) but certain moments are definitely given terrible cues. The film's 137 minutes feels a bit shorter, and that's a plus, but I'm not sure it knows what it wants to be? There's too much going on here for it to have a real message - it's just a good mystery. It's not important or relevant because it doesn't offer a conclusion to the film's hypothesis.