Damaged Goods

Rating: 8/10 (14 October 2003)

Mystic River is about killers, and not all the human kind. It's also about the things that kill us, little by little, from negligence more than malice: hatred, suspicion, even our personal histories. The first murder victim in this sad, moving film is not a person, but the innocence of a young boy who is abducted by two pedophiles and brutally raped for four days. When he grows up, that boy, Dave Boyle (Tim Robbins, looking like a sack of discarded laundry), is already damaged goods. His childhood best friends have pulled away, themselves tortured by the guilt of allowing him to get in the car who men they believed were police officers. One, Jimmy (Sean Penn) has spent time in prison; the other, Sean (Kevin Bacon, all ghostly and beaten), has achieved outward success as a Massachusetts police detective, but his personal life remains a mess. When Jimmy's daughter is murdered, Jimmy investigates, and Dave begins to look guilty. It is something of a misnomer to refer to the action of the film -- not a lot actually happens during its 140 minute run time, other than the emotional strip-mining of this clannish, woefully misguided Boston community of Catholic street toughs who have never quite matured into full-fledged human beings. The director, Clint Eastwood, seems to be saying few of us are truly evolved, that errors in judgment plague everything we do. Penn and Bacon give fully-realized performances, but Robbins is a walking wound, a laceration that has never scabbed over, so bedeviled as to break your heart. Laura Linney, as Penn's wife, has the steelines of Lady Macbeth, which she is only able to display in her limited screen time (she drops of the face of the earth for a full hour, without explanation). Only Marcia Gay Harden, frequently brilliant as an actress, delivers a poor performance as Celeste, Dave's mousy and annoyingly unsympathetic wife. As usual, Eastwood overdoses on the chiaroscuro lighting, casting every night scene in the half-light of a Caravaggio painting, but that's because he doesn't want you to see everything at once -- life isn't as simple as that. We only catch glimpses, by and large, of the big picture. And if there is a tragic message to Mystic River, it is that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing in the hands of the human animal.