We wash them clean.

Rating: 8/10 (3 July 2016)

Mystic River investigates the effects of one fateful car trip many years ago and its effects in the adults that manifested from them. If Eastwood had wanted to complicate things he might have given further identities to the young Jimmy, Dave and Sean, and asked us to ponder the differences in the years. But they are only kids, and still have so much time to develop, so Eastwood doesn't make mountains of molehills (the defiant one of the three, for example, could have had implications in the future).
The film falls short of being a masterpiece because it inevitably bogs itself down in the detective story of it all - the whodunit aspect and the police procedural investigation. Sean in these segments becomes less a character and more a uniform, with his straight-forward, no nonsense approach which curiously render him rather removed from the emotions of the whole affair, or at least compared to the turmoil that is thrust onto Jimmy and Dave. A better film might have shifted from that traditional Hollywood concern which is so determined to provide answers and instead explore the fractures the car trip has created in the extended lives of the three.
Another fault is that Eastwood spends the majority of his time on the three, but seldom puts the extended cast into focus. For Sean, he is reeling from the aftermath of a divorce, but this is scarcely addressed after his introduction and then magically resolved in the end. How powerful might Laura Linney's magnetic, macabre approval have been if a precedent had been established? If we saw the deep-seated emotions she praises in her husband, if her character had been afforded any relevance in the story previously? These closing moments feel tacked on, as if Eastwood felt the need to broaden his narrative but only realised too late.
So he builds the film from the bedrock of two powerhouse and academy award winning performances. First is Tim Robbins. He is, in a sense, playing two characters. The frightful and abusive past revealed through brief flashbacks allows us to be alert of its presence in his adult persona. The further we get in the film the more often it emerges. Robbins slips in and out of that child, trapped in the basement and in his own mind, blithering and babbling and reverting back into that shell. So in a way, when Jimmy answers that he last saw Dave years ago in that car, he is telling a truth. Penn's performance is not only driven but controlled by emotion. When he sobs for his daughter, he is at his most genuine, but for the rest of the film his mind is riddled with mistrust and paranoia and wrath. He becomes the best example for how the kids and community witness a trauma, and not fully understanding it, mark Dave from that day forth as damaged. Tragically, the truest image of them all is in the end, simple scrawlings in wet cement, weathered by time and lies.