Oh What Dreary Lives

Rating: Null/10 (11 October 2006)

Three young boys in Boston grow up to live in the same general neighborhood. As adults their lives go in different directions, but a murder reunites them, and causes them to reflect on a shared childhood incident important in the life journey of each of the three men. It's not a bad premise for a film. But as adults, the characters and their wives are doleful, downtrodden, grungy, and generally not very interesting. Their environment is drab. The film contains little humor. And the pacing is very slow.
"Mystic River" tries to be a character study of the three men, and a whodunit murder mystery, concurrently. But the film is overly wrought with back-story details about the characters. And the plot blends these details into the murder mystery, which results in a story that is muddled. The solution to the murder mystery is both implausible and contrived. The film's story is so convoluted that it suggests that the writer couldn't decide what to focus on, or what to cut out.
The film's ending provides some interesting ironies, and has a lot to say about the issue of fate. But with a runtime of well over two hours, and all that tedious detail, the film's theme tends to get lost in the meandering and unnecessarily complex plot. It's a common problem in today's big-budget Hollywood productions.
Some of the viewers who rate "Mystic River" so highly may be basing their evaluations on hype, generated from the big name cast, Eastwood as Director, and promotional considerations. The inherent merits, and demerits, of this film suggest to me that it is mediocre, at best.