Boredom unto Death

Rating: 3/10 (15 November 2003)

It is an ever-fresh source of astonishment to me to see how much this world forgives men (as opposed to, you know, women). They'll craft an overblown, self-indulgent, and absolutely crass piece of work like `Mystic River,' and immediately the critics will outdo each other with praise filled with enough high-sounding adjectives to generate a thesaurus of their own. But let a woman make a meaningful, intelligent film about women and men, or, god forbid, only women, and she'll be immediately attacked with the narrow gamut of vocab reserved for `chick flicks.' It makes you really, really sad.

I actually went to metacritic.com and read me the stellar reviews written by our major movie critics for `Mystic River.' Having seen the film last night, and having being variously puzzled, irritated, bored, and enraged by it, I had to see for myself what the critics saw in it that was so wonderful. Answer: you won't find out from the reviews. The above-mentioned critics are so busy telling us what a masterful director Eastwood and masterful actor Sean Penn are, and what masterful acting the director elicited from Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Marcia Gay Harden and Laura Linney, that they forget to give us a, you know, reading of the film (which you thought movie criticism was all about). But hey, this is Oscar material, what can you do? Gotta be handled with kid gloves.
So, since I have no Oscar-related obligations whatsoever, let me give you my reading of the film. Guys, meaning men, meaning white men, are very fragile and very fierce creatures. They are tough and powerful and all that, but when you hurt them, when you really hurt them, they thrash around in agony like wounded lions and bring a lot of destruction and self-destruction around them. Since, however, this is the majesty of the white male human animal, one can only look on in awe and marvel and terror. The enormity of the white male condition is such that criticism is really beyond the point. In `Mystic River,' men hurt, god they hurt, but they also rage, and Eastwood, not one to pull back when it comes to marveling at the majesty of the WMHA, shows the two emotions battle each other as if such battle were a true-blue epic. Beyond epic: as if it were metaphysics and existentialism and fate and cosmic law rolled into one. Heck, he even wrote his own gloomy score to accompany the drama of it all! So you see what I mean when I say that men are forgiven a whole lot in this world. Because this stuff, all metaphysics and epic aside, is as boring as s***. And I mean it, from the bottom of my heart.
Oscar Prediction: Best Director (Eastwood) and Best Actor (Penn) for this lousy film.