MYSTIC RIVER

MYSTIC RIVER
Clint Eastwood’s sombre masterpiece, from a novel by Dennis Lehane (Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential) did the adaptation),
is about a working-class Catholic community in Boston held in thrall by an old crime. Back in the seventies,
one of three eleven-year-old boys who were close friends was taken away by two men pretending to be cops
and sexually assaulted for days before he finally escaped. But it turns out that Dave (Tim Robbins) never escaped
at all. Twenty-five years later, he is still shrouded in dreams and terror, and his two friends, Sean (Kevin Bacon), a
homicide detective, and Jimmy (Sean Penn), an ex-con who runs a corner grocery, still feel the shame of not helping
him. When Jimmy’s nineteen-year-old daughter is murdered, the three are uneasily brought back together again.
The movie’s feeling for the neighborhood milieu is so convincing because there’s no distinction between background
and foreground—everything we see (faces, living rooms, back yards, weather, battered old cars) is dramatically
relevant. Eastwood directs in a gray, end-of-day light and with a minimum of camera rhetoric; he lets the script
and the actors do the work. Penn does a few semi-psychotic soliloquies in which he takes off into the stratosphere,
joining Marlon Brando as one of the great tragic actors of the screen.—D.D.
2 hrs. 17 min. When they were kids growing up together in a rough section of Boston, Jimmy Markum, Dave Boyle and Sean Devine spent their days playing stickball on the street, the way most boys did in their blue-collar neighborhood of East Buckingham. Nothing much out of the ordinary ever happened, until a moment's decision drastically altered the course of each of their lives forever. Twenty-five years later, the three find themselves thrust back together by another tragic event--the murder of Jimmy's 19-year-old daughter. Now a cop, Sean is assigned to the case and he and his partner are charged with unraveling the seemingly senseless crime. In the wake of the sudden and terrible loss of his child, Jimmy's mind becomes consumed with revenge--and his own plans to find the killer. Caught up in the maelstrom is Dave, now a lost and broken man fighting to keep his demons at bay. As the investigation creeps closer to home, his wife Celeste becomes consumed by suspicion and fear, while Jimmy's wife, Annabeth, draws her family tighter together in order to weather the storm.














A Dark Parable of Violence Avenged.
'Mystic River'' is the rare American movie that aspires to -- and achieves --
the full weight and darkness of tragedy.


At the beginning of Clint Eastwood's mighty ''Mystic River,'' , the camera drifts down from its aerial survey of Boston and alights
in a nondescript blue-collar neighborhood of triple-decker wood-frame houses and scuffed-up sidewalks. A couple of dads sit on
a back porch drinking beer and talking about the Red Sox, who are in the midst of their ill-starred 1975 season, while three boys
-- Dave Boyle, Jimmy Markum and Sean Devine -- play hockey in the street below.

The somber music (composed by Mr. Eastwood) and the shadows that flicker in the hard, washed-out New England light create an
atmosphere of impending danger, which arrives soon enough as a dark sedan pulls up and then drives away with Dave in the back.

Dave's abduction is an act of inexplicable, almost metaphysical evil, and this story of guilt, grief and vengeance grows out of it like
a mass of dark weeds. At its starkest, the film, like the novel by Dennis Lehane on which it is based, is a parable of incurable trauma,
in which violence begets more violence and the primal violation of innocence can never be set right. '





Type:
Features
Distributor:
Warner Brothers
Release Date:
October 8, 2003
Starring Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne, Marcia Gay Harden, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins. Directed by Clint Eastwood. (R, 137 minutes).
Clint Eastwood's film, scrupulously faithful to the letter and sprit of Dennis Lehane's novel, has the gritty efficiency of superior crime fiction
and the somber weight of tragedy. Set in working-class Irish Catholic Boston, this film revisits the themes of violence, honor and guilt that have
haunted many of Mr. Eastwood's movies; it is among the most humane of his films, but also the most rigorously pessimistic. Tim Robbins,
Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn play Dave, Sean and Jimmy, boyhood friends who must revisit the traumas of their youth when Jimmy's
daughter is murdered. Sean and his partner (Laurence Fishburne) must investigate the killing, which it appears Dave may have committed.
The performances are first rate. Marcia Gay Harden, as Dave's wife, Celeste, and Laura Linney, as her cousin Annabeth, who is married to Jimmy,
expand the film's emotional compass, allowing us to see how grief ripples through families and communities. Mr. Penn's volcanic, furiously
disciplined performance is surely one of the best pieces of screen acting you'll see this year; it may even be one of the finest ever.
— A. O. Scott, The New York Times


"...one of those rare films whose emotional power resonates long after you've left the theater." more...
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