Tragic Travesty of Tragedy - Is this really what you meant, Mr Eastwood???

Rating: 1/10 (11 December 2005)

The nauseating accolades that this monstrous movie has received just prove that Hollywood does its job very well. Throw in some brilliant actors, clever cinematography, a melodramatic score and an iconic director, and voilà - suspension of disbelief - of good sense - of morality itself. Perhaps it is the result of playing in too many Westerns in which there is no rule of law. Mr. Eastwood, for whom I had the greatest respect UNTIL I saw this film, seems to advocate a return to those times when we settled our differences with our guns and with impunity.
I sat through the bleak, depressing story, realizing that there was going to be no "Happy Hollywood Ending." But I was totally unprepared for one that completely exonerated the most foul deeds of the even more unsanitary characters. And that speech at the end by Laura Linney just served to sink the depths of the female characters to subterranean levels. Marcia Gay Harden's character, however, previously did much of the sinking when she literally put a contract out on her husband's life by telling her totally unfounded suspicions to the murdering thug played by Sean Penn.
Brilliant acting notwithstanding  an accolade that is also debatable except in the case of Tim Robbins  how can a movie that validates violence, murder, selfishness, lack of responsibility and consequences, be given any awards of any kind???? What kind of society are we, if we can become so dazzled by Clint Eastwood and his chosen actors that we miss the gaping hole where the film's moral center should be???? Or rather than absence, the film's moral center is one that is so amoral that it should be equally impossible to miss. Yet miss it so many of us have done.
If the intent of the movie was to shock us into outrage at the gross miscarriage of justice perpetrated at the end of the film, at the utter lack of sensitivity that the characters demonstrate towards the victims, then I would praise it as one of the best films of all time. But the message I received was not one so enlightened. And the utter horror  of the amoral message as well as of the blindness and/or acceptance of most of the public  totally undermined any redemption that might otherwise have been found in the dramatization by Tim Robbin's character of the long-lasting and wide-ranging effects of child molestation. His young friends did not protect him as a boy. They compounded this failing as adults. And we, the public, abandon him in like manner, when we honor those who would dishonor and destroy him.