Flashback: In praise of Mystic River, a triumph for Clint Eastwood

I thought it would be nice to revisit Mystic River, a remarkable movie and still a big favourite among Eastwood fans. Here is Kenneth Turan’s review from The Los Angeles Times (Oct 10^th, 2003) which I think summarises the film rather perfectly. Hard to believe this was 15 years ago.

Mystic River is a major American motion picture, an overpowering piece of work that involves some of the most basic human emotions: love, hate, fear, revenge, despair. Directed by Clint Eastwood with absolute confidence and remarkable control, it owes both its success and its significance to the way it seamlessly unites elements that are difficult to pull off on their own, much less together.

"Mystic River" is simultaneously an intricate and gripping crime story that involves child molestation and murder, and a thoughtful and disturbing emotional drama about the nightmarish past sending destructive tentacles into the present.

This is a major studio release that deals with the kind of dark and disconcerting material Hollywood usually tries to avoid. It's a star vehicle that provides memorable roles for half a dozen major players (Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne, Marcia Gay Harden, Laura Linney), yet also takes pains to cast even the smallest speaking parts with care.

It has both impeccable source material (Dennis Lehane's persuasive best seller) and a spare and impressive adaptation by Brian Helgeland that makes the difficult work of finding the film inside the book look simple and inevitable. And despite a respect for language that extends to the use of key dialogue from the book, "Mystic River" is faultlessly cinematic and a model of classic directorial style.

Best of all, "Mystic River" has Eastwood, an unflappable old master invigorated by the challenges inherent in the material. He's dealing with themes of masculinity and violence that have concerned him for decades, with emotions he understands from the inside, and venturing into deeper and murkier emotional currents than he's ever attempted before. What results also is Eastwood's best direction since "Unforgiven" and arguably the best, most mature work of his career.

Everything starts with Lehane's strong and economically written book, a breakthrough stand-alone novel coming after a series of five private eye books. "I was living with 'Mystic River' for 10 years before I wrote it," the author told Publishers Weekly, and that undoubtedly accounts for the subtlety and intricacy of its psychology, the way it gets to more emotion than is usual for a police procedural.

Set in a hard world where "the worst things did, in fact, sometimes happen," Lehane's is a story that understands life's fatal randomness, that explores how misplaced suspicions, unresolved hatreds, missed opportunities and shattering misunderstandings can color already complex situations where no one is really innocent and everyone lives with their own complicity.

"Mystic River" also is a story, on the page and on the screen, with an exact sense of place. Its aura of been-there atmosphere centers on the Boston neighbourhood of East Buckingham where the film was shot, a working class area, close by the Mystic River, also known as the Flats. "The Flats," Lehane wrote, "were nothing but a small town wrapped within a big city."

The drama begins with a critical extended flashback, set a quarter of a century in the past, a lazy late afternoon moment that finds 11-year-old pals Dave, Sean and Jimmy playing street hockey on a deserted stretch of pavement.

But, as moodily captured by cinematographer Tom Stern, even the most innocent-seeming city moments have an intangible edge of menace about them. A car pulls up, a man presenting himself as a police officer gets out and rousts the boys for a minor infraction. Dave is ordered into the car and suddenly, things get very dark very fast. "Ever think," Jimmy is to say decades later, "how one little choice can change a person's life?" Can change, it turns out, everyone's lives.

In an instant, it is 25 years later and the boys, still in Boston but no longer close ("now it's just hello around the neighbourhood"), now are adults with families, responsibilities. Dave (Tim Robbins), inevitably, is the one the past has affected most. Still living in the neighbourhood though married to the timid Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden) and with a son of his own, Dave Boyle has a sense of darkness and sadness around him that is so deep it seems to have swallowed the boy we saw without a trace. Of all the actors, Robbins has changed himself most for this role, taking on a strong Boston accent and changing his usual confident body language to play a haunted, interior man.

Work, at least, has taken Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon) a little farther away. He's become a "statie," a homicide detective working for the Massachusetts State Police, but he too has personal problems. Six months ago, his wife left; his only contact with her are random telephone interludes where she calls, stays on the line, but won't speak.

The role of Sean is the least showy of the three major characters, and it is the one most cut down from the novel, but it is essential as an anchor for the plot and for the audience to hold onto. Bacon does an expert job getting us involved in the critical choices and decisions of, in Lehane's words, "a guy the world has always worked for."

Sean is reluctantly pulled back to the old neighbourhood and his boyhood experiences when he and his partner Whitey (Laurence Fishburne) are assigned to investigate a crime in East Buckingham. It's a murder connected to the third of the boyhood pals, Jimmy Markum, a murder that will draw all three men closer together in unexpected and ultimately horrific ways.

As played by Sean Penn, Jimmy is the inevitable center of the story. Even as a child, Lehane writes, "if he was aware there were rules -- in the subway, on the streets, in a movie theater -- he never showed it," and that making-your-own-law quality still defines him though now he's the twice-married father of three daughters who owns a neighbourhood convenience store called the Cottage Market.

With a look that could pass through steel, a temper like the devil's wrath, and the hawk-like presence of a predator, Penn's Jimmy sits astride his world like a god of vengeance, terrifying even in repose. When he's not in repose, you'd better just get the hell out of the way.

The other above-the-line actors -- Harden as the mouse-like Celeste, Fishburne as the unrelenting detective and especially Linney as Jimmy's implacable wife Annabeth -- are equally impressive, as is Eli Wallach in a juicy unbilled cameo as a liquor store owner.

But "Mystic River," exactly cast by Phyllis Huffman, also is a film where you notice how even the actors in smaller roles are just right, people like Emmy Rossum as Jimmy's daughter Katie, Susan Willis as an elderly key witness, and Kevin Chapman as Val Savage, one of a trio of brothers known around the neighbourhood, not without reason, as "legends of psychosis."

The mastery -- and there really is no other word for it -- Eastwood demonstrates in this, the 24th feature he's directed, was not easily won and did not come at the end of an unbroken string of triumphs. But there can be no doubt that it's here. "It's as good as I can do," the director said in a quiet moment before the film was shown at Cannes, but it's more than that. It's as good as anybody can do.