coincidences galore mar film

Rating: 6/10 (4 November 2005)

I enjoyed Mystic River on some levels- cinematography, mood, setting, score, character development. I can even go along to some degree with ploys set up to connote a modern-day Shakespearean tragedy.
What I find totally implausible, however, are the numerous contrived coincidences needed to prop up the story- otherwise it falls over like a house of cards.
Katie Markum meets her doom at the hands of her boyfriend's mute brother(Silent Ray) and his buddy, when she randomly encounters them the night before she's supposed to run off with the boyfriend(Brendan). Silent Ray just happens to be playing around that night with a gun that was used in a liquor store robbery years before by Brendan's father. One of the boys takes a pot shot at Katie's vehicle, causing her to drive off the road injured, and when they discover they know the girl- well naturally, she's got to die, otherwise she'd rat them out, they figure.
Coincidentally, Silent Ray and Brendan's father (Just Ray) was killed by Katie's father (Jimmy) years before for ratting him out to the police and Jimmy did a two-year stretch in the pen before coming out and getting his revenge. And Katie just happened to fall in love with Brendan, the young man Jimmy dislikes because he's Just Ray's son.
Now Dave (Jimmy's boyhood friend), also of the neighborhood, just happens to see Katie in a bar just before she's killed (which later sets him up as a suspect). Dave's withdrawn from being molested as a kid, but coincidentally, on the fateful night of Katie's murder, he happens to run into another molester and ends up beating him badly. Oh, the irony.
Naturally, when Dave comes home with blood on his hands and relates the incident to his wife, Celeste, she becomes immediately suspicious when a news report reveals Katie's murder. This was a glaring plot contrivance.
There was no groundwork laid for Celeste's suspicions, never-the-less this being a Shakespearean tragedy, suspicion outweighed the bond they'd formed since childhood and subsequent marriage.
The third boyhood friend (of Jimmy and Dave)- Sean is a Boston detective and even though he rarely sees the guys anymore, he just happens (out of all the detectives in big-city Boston) to draw Katie's homicide case.
We know for this story to come full circle there must be more tragedy to balance the scales. Celeste relates her suspicions to Jimmy who, in turn, kills his friend Dave just before Sean solves Katie's murder.
There were other plot blunders. Even though Sean (and his partner Whitey) do bravura police work to connect Katie's murder to a 20-year-old robbery, we're then supposed to believe modern-day Boston hasn't advanced enough to unravel blood and fiber evidence at Katie's homicide scene and the scene where Dave beat up the molester.
Finally, Annabeth's (Jimmy's wife) speech near the end justifying Dave's murder is absurd- unless of course, you buy into the film as fable. But since it's presented as gritty realism, the scene feels out of place. Also awkward are Sean's phone conversations with his estranged wife who calls him up but says nothing. If this is meant to draw a parallel with the mute Silent Ray, it doesn't make sense.
If you recall Clint Eastwood's 1999 'True Crime', Eastwood plays a self-indulgent reporter who follows a string of clues of an old murder investigation, and is able to save the condemned man in the nick of time. Apparently, Eastwood thought that resolution was too pat and happy.
So in Mystic River, the detectives solve the case just a smidgen too late to keep Jimmy from killing Dave. Here, revenge and violence are deemed honorable emotions indifferent to the suffering of innocent people. If the wrong people die, so what- at least intentions were good.
The anguish worn by most of the lead characters also seems contrived, manipulating the audience into thinking they're watching something meaningful.