Eastwood's Imperfect But Powerful Tragedy

Rating: Null/10 (12 January 2004)

"Mystic River" is a film of vaulting ambition and director Clint Eastwood's brave attempt to make a great American Tragedy in a style not unlike Theodore Dreiser's fateful novels or Italian director Luchino Visconti's calamitous domestic dramas. That he partially succeeds is due in great part to a magnificent ensemble cast, a methodical, old fashioned deliberateness in the storytelling and a haunting music score (composed by Eastwood) that reverberates throughout the film like a memento of past sins and regrets.
Unfortunately "Mystic River" falls far short of greatness. Brian Helgeland's screenplay, based on Denis Lehane's compulsively readable crime novel, preserves the fascinating domestic drama but also retains much of the pedestrian dialogue that made the book little more than pulp fiction of a very average sort.
The story of three boyhood friends whose lives are forever intertwined by a traumatic childhood incident becomes a seemingly endless maze where the history of two working class Boston families are enmeshed in crimes of the past that echo into the present and inevitably the future. The great American playwright Eugene O'Neill was a master at dramatizing a particular family drama wherein his characters wore the past like a millstone around their necks. Clint Eastwood does the same thing here on an almost grander scale.
Where the movie trumps -up is in the trite exchange between characters, particularly in scenes involving a murder investigation and conversations between a distraught husband and wife. The faults of the novel are repeated to some degree in the film.
That being said, there is much to admire here. The performances by Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Marcia Gay Harden and Laura Linney are brilliant . Kevin Bacon does an admirable job with a rather hamstrung role as a cop assigned to a murder case. His scenes with Laurence Fishburne (another superb performance) are well acted but undermined by "Dragnet"-like dialogue that clashes with the more sobering domestic drama. Eastwood's deliberate pacing pays off at the finale. Much of the film is shot under gray skies and dimly lit nighttime scenes. A patriotic parade under a bright noonday sun seems like a strange coda to end this film, until the camera pans across the murky Mystic River at dusk , when all the power of this earnest but imperfect movie seems earned.