The best American movie i have ever seen

Rating: 10/10 (23 February 2004)

"We bury our sins"
Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River" is a tragic story about the past and how it can come back to haunt those again. Yet what is so interesting about Clint Eastwood's movies is that we can study the characters and actually relate to them. I think back on "Unforgiven" where Eastwood's character William Munny was forced to do what he did after money and the death of his best friend where involved.
The film's prologue shows three young boys from Boston; Jimmy, David and Sean as they play street hockey in the middle of the neighborhood, they lose the ball in the sewer and see a sidewalk filled with cement that hasn't dried and decide to write their names on the cement as a trademark. A car arrives as two old men who are pedophiles pose as cops to the three young boys and threaten to arrest them unless they go back to their parents. The cops ask young Davis on where he lives, and tells them that he lives on the other side. As a threat, they'll arrest him unless he goes with them to drop him off. The old men kidnap David for four weeks until he escapes from their cell, leaving him a burden he will carry for the rest of his life.
All three men are grown up now and have different lives.
Jimmy (Sean Pean) is the crook who has gone to jail already. He runs a mom and pop's store in the neighborhood where his oldest daughter (Emmy Rossum) works with him. He is also the neighborhood tough guy where two cousins from his wife (Laura Linney) are in his gang.
Sean (Kevin Bacon) is on the opposite side of the law where he is a detective who can't seemed to figure out why his wife left him while she was pregnant and doesn't want to say a word over the phone.
David (Tim Robbins) is still living the burden he carried when he was abused. His wife Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden) can never seem to figure out what is wrong with him as well, just the fact that he comes home one night with a wound and a hole in the middle of his shirt.
All three characters are re-united after the death of Jimmy's daughter in which Sean is the detective working on the case with his partner (Laurence Fishburne); David is consider a suspect in the murder case while Jimmy himself gets his wife's cousins to ask everybody in the neighborhood if they know anything about his daughter's murder.
"Mystic River" is a story about the past coming back to haunt those who experience the pain, and now coming back to those who didn't deserve it. With top-notch acting and superb directing from Eastwood himself, "Mystic River" proves to be a masterpiece in guilt.