Powerful Examination of Adults Haunted By Their Childhoods

Rating: 10/10 (20 December 2005)

"Mystic River" is a very American take on genres more usually evoked by Europeans, a sophisticated cross between the kitchen sink working class British films and the spare, family-style murder mysteries of Claude Chabrol and François Ozon, and that has only otherwise been achieved in the U.S. through whole seasons of "The Sopranos."
The clues to the mystery are subtly given to us within the first ten minutes when we meet the very individual yet deeply connected characters embedded within a powerful sense of place, isolated from downtown and change by the titular geography, with the looming bridge a constant visual landmark, only a notorious traffic bottleneck to most Bostonians.
My friend in Cambridge explains the geographical symbolism: "The Mystic River is Boston's "other river"--unlike the picturesque Charles, the Mystic is the working river lined with power plants, factories etc,---the neighborhood is supposed to be Charlestown--traditionally isolated, working class, old school so to speak,(and yes, much of Boston remains unpleasantly insular) that has been "yuppified" over the last twenty-five years, especially since the mid-eighties when the Orange Line elevated train came down. The Tobin Bridge that you see connects Charlestown, part of the City of Boston with Chelsea to the east, a separate municipality. The Mystic and Chelsea Rivers flow together into Boston Harbor--the working docks are in Charlestown, Chelsea, and East Boston across the Harbor from the North End and from Charlestown. In point of fact, some of the scenes were filmed in East Boston, as well as the Fenway and Franklin Park in Jamaica Plain."
The accents aren't completely accurate, but at least some regionalism is attempted. Overlooking it from the bridge, one of the key trio early on calls it "the old neighborhood," as he's somewhat left it, as in parallel his wife has somewhat left him, but both keep feeling silent tugs to come back.
Memory and time catches up to the audience too in seeing two of our finest actors as gray-haired fathers (very natural make-up and hair style work), but Sean Penn and Tim Robbins are masterful as damaged men and even more damaged parents haunted by their mutually touched yet separately karoomed past and present. They are living demonstrations of Faulkner's dictum "The past is never dead. It's never even past," with horrific consequences for all.
The strong theme of the sins of the fathers keeps the men up front, but their wives are crucial fulcrums for loyalty and motivation, as they are in The Sopranos, and Laura Linney's and Marcia Gay Hayden's characterizations chillingly match the men one-on-one at the climax and conclusion.
The constant sense of brooding unease is promulgated enormously by director Clint Eastwood's masterful music which floats up like a body in the river and keeps up the tensions in even quotidian-seeming scenes. Sound in general bubbles up for atmosphere, from Red Sox games to telephone rings.
The cinematography is lusciously saturated (Tom Stern doing his first lead, up from lighting) for gray skies that ironically clear up to blinding sunshine at the uneasy end, for a neighborhood parade that celebrates Patriot's Day while most of Boston is doubtless cheering on the marathoners.
(originally written 10/31/2003)