HondaReport.com Movie Review
Title: Mystic River
Pupule’s Rating: * * * ½ stars

MPPR Rating: R
Date of Viewing: Sunday, October 19, 2003
Location: Dole Cannery

By Paul Honda
Monday, October 20, 2003

Coming into this film, Clint Eastwood had already had a profound effect on the way I watched movies, in the way I enjoyed them, and particularly in the way I saw him direct them.

Forget Dirty Harry and the smorgasbord of Eastwood westerns that defined his acting career. For me, Eastwood is as his musical taste is—jazz on a sparse, but fulfilling diet. Sometimes haunting, and alternately blissful and melancholy. The Bridges of Madison County remains one of the most memorable motion pictures I have seen. (He deserved an Oscar more for Bridges than for Unforgiven.) Eastwood’s ability to allow his actors to act—Meryl Streep was spectacular as a countryside wife and mother in Bridges—was yet another gem for the cast of Mystic River. From Sean Penn to Tim Robbins to Marcia Gay Harden and beyond, Mystic River is an actor’s paradise. Eastwood’s willingness to trust them, to milk the last drop out of each character, and his gift for extracting the torment of a man’s soul from an actor—there are but a handful of directors capable of such work.

The Plot: The lives of three boys are shaped—even haunted—by a predatory pair of pedophiles in a scene that opens the film. Fast-forward to two decades later, long after the trio had gone separate ways after the painful incident. They are reunited in a macabre sense by the murder of the 19-year-old daughter of one of the now-grown up boys. The story weaves and bobs until a remarkable, disturbing conclusion that is, well, you’ll see for yourself.

The Hype: The packaging of Mystic River suffocated the TV airwaves in the weeks leading into the film’s release. Sparse and shaded in dark and gray shades, there was never too much information in the commercials and ads, thankfully. But it was there, time after time, to remind me that Mystic River is out soon and that I better not freaking miss it. As if I were planning to.

Strengths: The beauty of having 140 minutes to tell a story that comes from a novel is that the opportunity is there to stay true and integral to the source. Dennis Lehane’s finely layered book spares no detail, gives no false illusions, and certainly gives each pivotal character—even down to detectives Whitey Powers (yes, that’s Laurence Fishburne’s character) and his partner, named Sean, played by Kevin Bacon. How they picked up Boston-area accents is beyond me, but it passes because I’m no expert on New England vocalisms.

From Lehane’s original text and Brian Helgeland’s screenwriting, the strength of this film is in its plot, twists and storytelling, which is where Eastwood’s patient touch is impeccable. It’s enough—and I won’t give away more than a few percentage points of the plot—that Penn’s Jimmy Markham endures a parent’s worst nightmare from the early moments of the story. It’s another that Eastwood’s camera gets up close and tight with angles of all the principal characters. Tim Robbins’ Dave Boyle is tormented from an early age, as we see in the opening scene, and his no-frills, yielding personality sets the stage for the chaos and mayhem that follow a detailed tour of the investigation headed by the two detectives.

While Robbins and Penn deserve nominations for their work, Marcia Gay Harden deserves a very close look, too. Living as a man who guards his secret from his wife is tough enough for Robbins’s character, but as the man’s wife, Harden comes through brilliantly as a confused, brittle and unintentionally fearful woman who seems to ask very little of a husband she still knows little about. The commitment to sculpting each key character is one that Eastwood developed with excellence.

Weaknesses: There are questions that are left unanswered despite the efforts and performances of Eastwood and his cast. Disclaimer here—I am going to note some key plot points and conclusions, so if you haven’t seen the film yet, stop here.

While the development of plot and characters were outstanding, the ending was way too convenient for me to sidestep and ignore. How are we to believe that Dave Boyle’s wife (Celeste) would confide serous doubt, and even tell the father of the murder victim about it? How are we to believe that any wife would tell a dangerous man—an ex-con who was sent to prison for burglary—that she believes her husband killed the man’s daughter? It doesn’t work. From that moment on, Harden was still mesmerizing as a weakened, embattled wife, but the writing was just a bit too slippery.

In addition, the wife of Jimmy Markham, a non-factor throughout the story, shows up in the final 10 minutes as her husband bemoans and laments the fact that he has taken justice into his own hands—and killed the wrong man. She spends a minute repeating her own sentences—possibly for lack of writing endurance in a 2-hour, 20-minute film—to convince her suddenly conscientious husband that he only did what he had to do, and that he would always—as she told their young daughters—do whatever it takes to protect them. But when she capitulates her monologue by saying that, honey, “You could run this town,” all of a sudden the feel for Markham as a father who just wanted justice turns into a borderline mafia-wannabe story. Up to this point, the only semblance Markham has to being a ringleader is bossing his two stooges, the “Savage brothers” around.

It’s a glitch. It’s distracting, and great writing doesn’t distract; great writing emboldens, says things that we barely dare to think, let alone say. Great writing brings truth to the forefront with an economy of words and the broadest spectrum of emotion. Great writing lifts the spirit, lets it sag in a storm, but ultimately shows—not tells—the pendulum that slices every soul.

Finally, the acknowledgement by Bacon’s detective character at the end that he always suspected Markham would make a fatal mistake was far, far too convenient, as with Boyle’s wife and Markham’s wife, was just too gift-wrapped for my taste. If the detective knew all along that Markham had killed one of his thug cohorts two decades earlier, why did he bury his information—and keep his partner in ignorance—throughout the investigation. There’s not a single iota of suggestion to us that this knowledge existed.

Then, the curveball arrives post-mortem (the second killing, not the first) to loop everything together. That allows the detective and Markham to co-exist in the small town, apparently, as they eyeball each other at the town parade and gesture their versions of acceptance. It makes for an interesting, poignant, but unbelievable closing scene.

It’s one thing for the Jimmy (Markham), Sean (detective) and especially Dave (Boyle) to have experienced a horrific incident in childhood. But it’s incredibly naïve to feed an audience 2 hours and 15 minutes of balanced momentum—and a fair amount of guessing—only to sew it all up with a few lines and dialogues at the close.

Exhibit A: When Markham first learns that he has killed Boyle, his childhood pal, in vain, he winces. But then he turns robotic and shrugs it off with a bottle of Jack Daniels. And as the detective, Bacon, connects the dots and assumes correctly that Markham has done the unthinkable, he is amazingly tolerable of the killing. How we’re to believe that Sean has no affection, no sympathy and no remorse over the ungodly pain and death of Boyle is beyond me.

Without an honest pen, the story falls flat at the end more than anything because it had been SO honest for the first 135 minutes. It falls, not on its face, but certainly on its behind.

Other than that, I loved this film. It’s a lavish dinner with rusty nails for desert.

Best Scene: The writing is so piercing, I admit to being riveted in the way that all good films capture me, i.e. I never looked at my watch once. Fishburne is a necessary fixture as the no-B.S. detective to Bacon’s friend-of-the-victim’s-father. From the start, he was integral to the rhythm and pace with one simple line to Bacon, who is still in obvious pain over a separation with his wife. After Bacon’s Sean politely turns down an invite to socialize with a particularly fine-looking female cop, Powers says: “The body. The voice. The cuffs. She makes gay guys rethink their orientation.”

Another memorable line came from Markham—and Penn had plenty of gut-wrenching time on film—in a scene that wasn’t the most intense, but certainly one of self-questioning. He says to his fallen daughter, “I know in my soul I contributed to your death, but I don’t know how.” It’s one of those lines that jumps off the screen and screams for empathy, but from that point on, Penn had to do everything he could to keep Markham from being totally filled with bloodlust.

Robbins, however, may have signed his name on the Oscar dotted line when Boyle and his wife have the kind of argument that two very confused, almost passive-aggressive people do when they can’t communicate pain. Boyle turns from his late-night scary old movie to question Celeste for doubting his whereabouts on the night of the murder. In the midst of defending himself—one of the few times he isn’t coming up with an alibi—he harkens back unconsciously to The Incident, and it sends Celeste past the breaking point of trying to understand. “It’s like vampires,” Boyle says. “Once it’s in you, it stays.”

Robbins says this with the complete and utter resignation, pain and—in a strange way—relief that comes with the utterance of the two names that have tormented him since the day he was abducted as a child. It is a scene in a dark parlor of their apartment, in the middle of the night, and its reality is far more revealing and haunting than any horror butcher flick could ever be.

Worst Scene: The aforementioned closing scenes between Markham and the detective are among them, but “worst” is not quite the right definition. I cannot fault the direction, acting, cinematography or anything else. It was simply devoid of real nutrients, especially as Celeste wandered frightfully, hoping in vain to see her husband in the crowd of parade watchers.

Summary: This is a must-see work of art, especially for any fan of Eastwood’s direction—and music. His prints are all over this baby, for which I am glad. I just wish it could’ve been an A-plus instead of an A-minus.

Discretionary notes: Plenty of cussing, shots of the victim at the scene of the crime, at the coroner’s office, at the mortuary. Also, a brutal knifing near the end. The crux of the story—the child sex abuse at the beginning—has a “twin” occurrence near the end of the film. It is not a movie for kids under 13, and even then, I’d be very careful about bringing teenagers who don’t process mature themes well.

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