Directed by Clint Eastwood. Written by Brian Helgeland
The trauma of the past, its rippling effect, and the haunting possibilities of “what if” make for dense cloud cover in Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, a story of three men marked by a terrible crime in their shared youth who decades later must enter each other’s orbits as part of a murder investigation.
Dave was a kind, nervous boy who was abducted by pedophiles and kept in a room for four days before clawing his way to an escape. Now he’s a loving father and husband, but understandably a haunted figure of a man, carrying a quiet ache as he makes his way through life a stone’s throw from where it happened.
Jimmy and Sean watched as Dave was snatched off the street. Jimmy would go on to do petty and not-so-petty crime, finally settling into small business ownership running the neighborhood corner store. Sean distanced himself from it all, becoming a state police murder detective. Jimmy drowns his anger with alcohol, and keeps it under control. Sean lies to himself and tells his partner he’ll have no problem maintaining a professional distance to his old friends once he’s called on to investigate the murder of someone all three men know intimately. The ghosts of the past come rushing at them all, and you could argue they never left.
Mystic River is a murder mystery, but it’s a story of men beset by trauma and their inability to deal with it. It sees big performances from Sean Penn, whose dense little body trembles with poorly hidden anger as Jimmy, Tim Robbins, whose jowls settle into gloom as Dave, and Kevin Bacon, whose cheekbones and bared teeth resemble a death mask in confrontation with the unresolvable.
Like its namesake, Mystic River has its ebbs and flows, and is uneven across the board. Sean Penn goes for the fences, sometimes hitting home runs and sometimes swinging himself out of his shoes. He takes Jimmy’s volatility a little too much to heart. Bacon and Robbins play it a little closer to the chest, but even they give in to excessive emoting at times. Eastwood’s movie deals with trauma to be sure, but its lack of sophistication in unpacking it makes some scenes clumsy and overwrought.
Brian Helgeland’s script is similarly an unsteady affair. Some passages are excellent, and one belongs to Laura Linney, who plays Jimmy’s wife and turns into Lady Macbeth for one startling sequence. At other times, it’s clunky stuff with dialogue bordering on B-movie banter, and Laurence Fishburne has the thankless task of trying to breathe life into it as Sean’s partner. He doesn’t quite manage. Helgeland and Eastwood also fail Bacon’s Sean in an attempt to give him an emotional stake, providing him instead with something more baffling than the murder mystery he’s meant to solve.
Mystic River deals with something terrible, both in its past, and in its present, and it’s impossible for it to not be wrenching at times with the creative firepower involved. Unfortunately it can’t quite sustain itself over its runtime and gel into a cohesive portrait about three broken boys who are destined to splinter and destined to define each other’s lives.
Mikkel Frederiksen 