Blue-eyed and pitiless

Rating: Null/10 (30 June 2004)

Mystic River involves abduction, sexual abuse, murder and vigilante justice, but by far the most frightening thing about it is Laura Linney. As the second wife of reformed criminal Jimmy Markum (Sean Penn), we have seen her smiling as her daughter collects her first Communion and winced at her husband's constant reference to his first wife, but right at the end she emerges as a social Darwinist and endorser of violent means, any means, to protect the family home. You may have killed the wrong man, she says, but you did it for our daughters, so it was the right thing to do. She stands blue-eyed and pitiless, regal, at a street parade awash with American flags.
The film is set in Boston, a grey New England city. Clint Eastwood directed: he maintains a steady pace, and a stately distance from his actors. Eastwood has an extraordinary feeling for flesh: every member of the cast has an indelible physical presence. The story centres on three childhood friends: Jimmy Markum, Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon) and Dave Boyle (Tim Robbins). As children, they are one day on the street when a mysterious car halts, and a man pretending to be a figure of authority abducts Dave. He is held in a cellar for four days before getting away. The movie jumps forward thirty years: Jimmy's nineteen year-old daughter is murdered, and Dave falls under suspicion. Sean is the investigating officer.
The actors are extraordinary. As a man who cannot get away from early trauma, Robbins' eyes are simultaneously cloudy and brimming, twin bright orbs of darkness. He shuffles, shoulders hunched, and talks in a disabled mumble. Bacon is concise: there is no excess flesh on his face, even in his cheeks. Penn grows more rugged with time: his gathering wrinkles give him a sense of solidity. (His grief is contrasted with that of his daughter's boyfriend (Brendan Harris). Tears come easily to his smooth-skinned face, round like a doll. No matter how genuine, Harris' feelings do not have the same sense of gravity.) Then there is Linney, with her terrible blue eyes.
It emerges that Jimmy was an underworld king, an Irish-Catholic don. In the course of Mystic River he re-assumes that role: he has two thickset thugs carry on an investigation into the murder, and acts on their findings. Dave's wife (Marcia Gay Harden, a twitching, fearful contrast to Linney) makes a confession to Jimmy and he hugs her, as though absolving her of any wrongdoing. Finally, he makes a delayed entrance into a deserted bar where an intended victim is already hemmed in by the thugs. The film might be subtitled: How a reformed crime boss might justifiably take back his mantle. Eastwood relies on the heavy feeling of dread that hangs about the movie like a fog to steer us to a conclusion not justified by the material. We return again and again to the sidewalk where Dave was abducted (The boys scrawled their names there in wet cement.), as if to say: in a world where something like this can occur, anything goes. I disagree.