Mystified by all the praise

Rating: 3/10 (19 October 2003)

Ugh. What a repugnant piece of work this is-patronising and full of pretension; it feels as if Eastwood were filming Titanic in a bathtub and fancied himself James Cameron. But that's the least of it. Mystic River arrives on a tidal wave of prestige: an Oscar winning director, Oscar winning screenwriter, the majority of its cast Oscar nominees and/or winners. It's an impressive package. The actors make a mighty effort-none more so than Laura Linney, alternately mastering and mangling a Boston dialect-but Eastwood falls on his sword, aided in part by a lacklustre screenplay contributed by Brian Helgeland.
Ostensibly a character piece-at least in pace-Eastwood lacks either the confidence, skill or instinct to let go of the superficial trappings of a thriller, which this potentially searing drama most certainly is not. There are no thrills here, folks, no mystery, no suspense and the only mysticism is in the title. This isn't a whodunit. Eastwood makes sure of that by telegraphing the outcome through his use of obvious, clumsy symbolism. This is a human tragedy of imperfect people struggling with extraordinary circumstances; but the workings of that tragedy have to be achieved before they can be elevated to such a grand scale. On the one hand, you could see where the story of a community of friends and relatives torn apart by random criminal acts would resonant for the director and star of-how else to put this?-westerns. But therein lies the trouble. The demands of dramatising a contemporary, convincing urban community in distress are far greater than the prefabricated iconography of the western. Demands that Eastwood appears to be blissfully unaware of; Mystic River presents a directorial challenge to which he simply never rises.
It's actually a little worse than that. Eastwood demonstrates an uncertain sense of tone-and not just in his self-penned score which surely sounded better when he composed it on his Casio keyboard than it does in the cinema. Delicate, sensitive elements of this story-child abuse, abduction and murder, to name a few-are handled, mishandled or just plain overexposed to the point of verging on exploitation, mostly because he thinks this film is about the narrative as opposed to the obvious, overwhelming grief of a father who's daughter doesn't come home one night or the young boy who was left to rescue himself from his abductors-an abduction that, as staged by Eastwood, his two best friends are more or less complicit in. (Not that this merits any investigation from the director.) This is just one of several awkward stagings; others would include his ghastly, unnecessary overhead shot of a victim in a park that pushes the audience away from the characters and into the position of voyeurs, as well as another act of violence, later in the film that gives way to a complete white out of the screen as Eastwood misjudges the moment (or distrusts the drama) and reaches for a kind of majesty where none exists. In fact, both scenes end in white outs-a technique that flags Eastwood's overall discomfort with this material.
And what material it is.but Eastwood's adherence to genre in what emerges as an anti-thriller, stifles the potential catharsis this drama might have. He seems to understand that Mystic River is about a larger, human tragedy-hence, the portentous and superficial epic quality he applies so liberally, as if he's actually earned it-but gives into the contrivances of a thriller at every turn. Perhaps most disappointingly, Eastwood strains to withhold from the audience the characters and circumstances-the very heart of this story-that would make it at all edifying. This ultimately severely lessens the impact of the drama as Eastwood tries unsuccessfully to solve the crime and heighten the tragedy simultaneously-so much effort when just allowing the audience to see the characters and the action for who and what they are would've been much more compelling, allowing the audience to compose the tragedy for themselves and engage in it fully as an inevitability as opposed to some surprise plot twist.
First and foremost, this is a film about men, and a rather insulting one at that considering Eastwood's narrow view of them. In Mystic River, boys are not allowed to be boys, fathers are not allowed to be fathers because everyone-even the women-have to be like men, manly with a capital m. This presents itself not so much as stoicism as it does broad caricature, particularly when Penn, a bad guy who in the last nineteen years has undergone a reformation of sorts, shows up around 11 o'clock in full leathers, including gloves. Not since Olivia Newton-John in Grease has a performer made such an obvious, attention-getting entrance. Penn invests his character, Jimmy, with a hefty humanity but Helgeland's script isn't written to Penn's strengths-ultimately, Jimmy just seems an ignorant lout despite Penn's graceful intimations that he is so much more. One missed opportunity on a tote board of many. Kevin Bacon and Laurence Fishburne, the homicide gumshoes on the case, give what they can but Eastwood and his screenwriter overlook the fact that even in a mystery/thriller, the drama usually rests with the investigator(s) on the case and what compels them personally to solve it. Here, they simply move the plot along as we are asked to believe that Bacon has been carrying on a relationship for six months with his mobile phone and a disembodied pair of lips (his estranged wife that Eastwood rather inexplicably shoots from above the chin and below the nose-go figure). It's not big and it's not clever-both this conceit and the abduction in the opening scenes feel like the kind of scenarios that work better in novels where the payoff might be bigger. Here, they are simply unbelievable, at least as Eastwood presents them. Robbins is strait-jacketed into a sort of homage to Boo Radley; his is, by far, the most interesting character but Eastwood is content to just indicate this character's sorrows rather than investigate them. As is born out in the end, Robbins' character is in a completely different movie altogether and merely wanders around the sets of Mystic River, his pain and dislocation just so much red herring, played as so much bait to Eastwood's would be morality play or further Oscar mongering, a rather tasteless dramatisation of child abduction, paedophilia and murder.
The women each get one opportunity a piece to audition for the part of Lady MacBeth, presumably in some future Eastwood production (or Mel Gibson's). Which is a shame really considering the women are Marcia Gay Harden and Laura Linney; one playing a woman who thinks her husband is a murderer, the other secretly pleased at the absence of her stepdaughter, regardless of how brutal her demise. Both are rich with possibilities, both reduced to abrupt snapshots.
Ultimately, what really rankles is Eastwood's `honour among men' ending; again, reaching for some kind of majesty-fingers running amok over the Casio keyboard-Eastwood posits that men do what they have to do, blah, blah, blah, in some lame elevation of the importance of the American family above all else-truth, justice-it's the American way. However, what one is left with-in this day and age-is that Americans, ignorant and lacking ethics, will protect their cosy way of life at any cost, no matter whose blood is flowing down the mystical or otherwise polluted river. It couldn't end on a less empathic note.
Eastwood's supporters are more than happy to do the work for him and applaud this ambitious effort but what appears on screen in Mystic River is a muddle of missed opportunities and clumsy, unchallenging storytelling; Eastwood seems assured enough but allows too much of Mystic River to fall between the cracks.
Tom Guiry does impressive work as the boyfriend of the missing girl.