Perhaps Eastwood's best as a producer/director.

Rating: Null/10 (23 October 2003)

Clint Eastwood uses his trademarked helicopter shots better then he ever has in Mystic River, and their meaning has extra portent here: God watches over us all, but is ironically not always present. Easily the director's best work since 1992's Unforgiven, it asks a parade of important questions about fate, which make it perfect movie-material, since films are all about, in Lars Von Trier's words, `the God's-eye-view.' Shot by Tom Stern in a burnished, nostalgic style that, even in its mostly present-day sequences, suggests that its characters are permanently mired down by the past, it begins with young Boston punk Jimmy Markum enticing his buddies Dave and Sean into scratching their names into freshly-poured cement. Dave is the last to print, but before he's done, he'll be lured by fear and insecurity into a car ride that changes his life for the worse.
Suddenly, before the horror of this situation fully sinks in, we're vaulted thirty years later into the boys' adult lives. Jimmy (Sean Penn), hair streaked gray and skin prison-weathered, is now the owner of a corner store, a longtime widower of a woman who bore him one daughter, Katie (Emily Rossum), then promptly died of cancer before she could see her husband free from a liquor store robbery rap. Now remarried to Annabeth (a tough Laura Linney), and with a new passel of children, Jimmy seems to have found equilibrium in his life. Meanwhile, Dave (Tim Robbins) is the haunted father of a boy who himself carries the weight of Dave's troubled past, who can't find the joy in simply playing baseball because he feels that his failures weigh on his dad even further. Dave is now married to Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden), a shell-shocked housewife who dances as fast as she can to keep up with Dave's neuroses, but is soon to be overcome by an event that tests her faith in her husband's sanity.
The third in the triumvirate, Sean (Kevin Bacon), along with his partner Whitey (Laurence Fishburne, excellent as the film's one detached, reasonable character), is called out to a Boston crime scene. Sean has long since lost contact with his old friends, but the past is constantly hectoring him. Bedeviled by a damaged wife who ran away with their child and makes silent long-distance phone calls to her emotionally needy but distant husband (in the film's one overly-sentimental device), Sean has thrown himself wholly into his detective work as a way of forgetting all he's been through. When he and Whitey are called into his old neighborhood, Buckingham Flats, on a murder investigation, Sean knows this can't be good; Bacon's face shows the gravity of a life lived experiencing death in a myriad of forms.

Thus begins an overcast story that mirrors Unforgiven in profound ways. Whereas the Oscar-winning western explored the mercenary past of perpetrators who are constantly lying to each other and themselves, Mystic River takes the more difficult road in examining the indefensible crimes of victims: the crime of making wrong choices, of not fighting back, of not taking a stand and following long-held faiths in gods and loved ones. Because of this, Mystic River is one of the saddest movies I've ever seen, a whooshing, screaming peer into the lycanthropic existence of nightcrawlers who've been bitten by violence and betrayal.
Certainly the centerpiece of the film is a scene between Robbins and Marcia Gay Harden, where Dave's demons come raring to the surface in a room illuminated only by the flickering image of a horror film on the television. Robbin's eyes burn through the screen as he brings us into Dave's firefly-ridden world of werewolves, vampires, and aliens. The allegory is quite apt, and heartbreaking, just as the stories of such horror characters often are; once infected, victims like Dave only have to wait for the soul's full moon before they are once again transformed into a monster that knows not what he or she does. Robbins' performance is a standout in his career, and certainly marks him as the frontrunner for a slew of yearend awards. He is tortured, panicked, darkened, confused, and dead inside. Harden, too, stands out in this cast, with a character that's buffeted between truth and fiction, between perceived loyalty to a husband she's starting to mistrust, and a larger morality that demands she do the right thing, even if it might be the wrong thing.
Eastwood is lucky to have Stern's shadowy yet sun-drenched photography at his disposal-it makes Mystic River into a sullen tone poem. Eastwood's longtime collaborators also make essential contributions: Joel Cox's editing is tensely precise, particularly in the film's final third; production designer extraordinaire Henry Bumstead (whose credits, incredibly, include Vertigo, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Sting, and Slaughterhouse-Five) produces a Boston that is palpably real, and closing in on its inhabitants; and composer Lennie Niehaus, who takes second billing to Eastwood for the (mostly) subtle, piano-driven score that hardly ever pushes our buttons. And we must pay tribute to Brian Helgeland's driven script, his best since his dealings with Curtis Hanson on L.A. Confidential. Working from novelist Dennis Lehane's best-selling source material, he and Eastwood have fleshed out an intimate, tasteful, cynical look at those who let themselves be whisked away and ruined by wickedness, and those follow but refuse to feel bad about it.