Review of Mystic River

by Roger Baldwin

Mystic River, directed and co-produced by Clint Eastwood, has been given the most respectful reviews of any Hollywood film in 2003. Had Peter Jackson not been born, it may well have swept the Oscars. Its content has the utmost gravity, every nook is tendered with care and professionalism, the ensemble cast has laurel wreaths wrapped around it. Though undeniably engrossing, however, I found it too-frequently heavy-handed and sometimes baffling.

Mystic River has scope and scale, it is about how sins of the past ripple across a generation to invade and destabilize the present, about the fragile fabric of even the most apparently-cohesive, ethnic, embedded community. The story begins with three boys in the Flats—an archetypal Boston, Irish, working-class neighborhood in 1975. One of them is abducted and sexually brutalized for four days, and then escapes. The bulk of the movie picks up almost three decades later, after those boys have become men, each tainted or disabled by the initial cataclysm. One is Jimmy Markum (Sean Penn), a volatile ex-con, widowed and remarried, who has driven himself with heroic effort to semi-respectability, as proprietor of Cottage Market, out of adoration of his eldest daughter Katie (Emmy Rossum), the apple of his eye and his salvation; she is murdered, and that act sets off an unfolding opera of retribution and violence. Another is Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon), a sardonic homicide detective who investigates the case, and a man with significant relationship problems of his own. The third is the abused kid, Dave Boyle (Tim Robbins)—an overprotective father and shuffling soul so emotionally neutered and disoriented you wonder how he ever made it to adulthood, much less held together a family. The childhood friends, driven apart by an act of grim fate, are unhappily reunited in its second act. Dave quickly becomes the chief suspect in Katie's killing—though his guilt or innocence remains a bold-face question mark until the final 15 minutes or so—and the rest of the film is an escalating, suspicion-riddled, search-and-destroy mission, a competitive race between Sean and Jimmy, between legal and tribal justice.

Pedophilia and child molesting are our generation's chosen traumas. As with the Holocaust, most dramas that seriously engage them get reverential treatment, whether or not it is deserved. The issue is so dreadful that any piece of fiction or documentary which righteously opposes it, we want to approve of. But you have to be very careful how you treat it, otherwise child abuse becomes the lazy writer's fallback, the sure thing, Lifetime Channel's button-pushing movie-of-the-week. The theme so crowds novels, movies and television that it cheapens the awful nature of the act through overexposure, by making it predictable and banal. In an earlier era those taboo spots were filled, not often but most daringly, by homosexuality, or interracial romances. Rape and incest remain current, they still are sometimes the dreaded secret, revealed only at the story's end. But eventually it becomes so anticipated that it deadens the viewer to any shock. When deviance becomes mainstreamed, instead of recoiling you're likely to think, oh, that one again. Unthinkable acts can forfeit their power to repel when absorbed into the marketing calculus of mass entertainment. Which is morally reprehensible, even when the writers and directors have the best of intentions. The violation of innocents becomes just another overwrought signpost on the landscape of popular culture, a parent's worst imaginable nightmare flattened into perfunctory melodrama.

Mystic River is by no means crass exploitation, it is deeply felt, always unsettling, often grueling. Mr. Penn's quieter, grieving-father moments are almost unendurable to watch; his grief, his story, is the movie's emotional core, nothing else approaches its raw, unmediated power. The scene of Jimmy first discovering his daughter's death—as he howls and writhes in despair—has ignited critics' imaginations and called up enthusiastic comparisons to the young Brando. But Penn works better when he is less showy. He is at his most towering at his most restrained, his impulses of guilt and rage, of hurt and helplessness and vindictiveness articulate themselves as layered and conflicted forces of nature as he masks them. They aren't acted so much as they organically escape, an awesome and unrivaled thing, an über-Brando.

Mystic River, even with a multitude of strengths, didn't particularly deepen my understanding of child endangerment, it seemed rather familiar (for some truly curdling acts of twisted malevolence, watch one of the better episodes of A&E's unembellished American Justice or Cold Case Files). It needs to pay more attention to rational plot development, there is an accumulation of inconsistencies. Perhaps I'm too steeped in the strict logistics and psychology of True Crime to appreciate fully its broader, sometimes sloppy, fictional counterpart, but a realistic crime drama needs internal logic to be persuasive, and screenwriter Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential) confused me. His dialogue, borrowed liberally from Dennis Lehane's novel, is, a few speeches aside, gritty and taut. Yet the circumstances that lead up to the climactic execution are a stretch. (If you haven't seen the movie, skip this paragraph and the next, I'm giving away the store here). Had Dave admitted to killing a child molester in an act of statutory prostitution, rather than concocting an unlikely mugger scenario, he would have been a local hero, I would have acquitted him (and it would seem that his real offense might give him a sense of closure and control rather than fraying what's left of his sanity. His personality looks more like that of an unhinged victim of Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder, not an unhinged killer, which would explain his passivity and melancholy and frightening monologues, but not the hyperviolent murder of a nice young girl). Rather, he appears to confess to a crime he didn't commit, or maybe he didn't confess, it isn't clear ("I didn't do it. I didn't do it....Yeah, I did it"), it seemed almost a matter of semantic confusion (which of the two murders was he admitting), to precipitate a rush to judgment.

The final explanation for Katie's murder, as told to Jimmy by Sean as the two drink whiskey on a curb at dawn, made little sense (the killers "were just trying to scare her...and didn't want her to tell anybody," Sean says. So they cracked her head like a melon, after she was dead). The real explanation lies in Jimmy's self-accusation, "I know in my soul I contributed to your death. But I don't know how." Here's how—Just Ray Harris, a conspirator of Jimmy's, ratted Jimmy out in a long-ago, liquor-store heist in order to avoid prison himself. Jimmy's wife died of cancer, without him, while he was incarcerated, and when Jimmy was released he shot Ray and dumped his body in the Mystic River in a tribal act of family compensation. Just Ray's youngest son, Silent Ray, consequently had no father and became emotionally dependent on his older brother Brendan. Brendan fell in love with Katie and planned to elope with her, so Silent Ray with his buddy shot her and bludgeoned her corpse, with resentful overkill, in order to hold onto the only father figure he had and the only person he ever loved. Jimmy's honor killing begets violence in ways he could never have anticipated. Which ties up critical plot points with a satisfying black irony, but they are so deeply buried it's a challenge to thread them together, this particular theme cries out for clarification. Moreover, I wasn't sure why Silent Ray would pretend a physical disability (to make Brendan more protective of him and draw them closer?), or more importantly how he could carry it off for so long (his mother seems to imply that he was always mute, that's quite an act). Brendan near the end, after realizing his brother's guilt, says to him, "I know you can speak." But how would he know that? We're not given a clue, it's passed over as though irrelevant.

We witness here the shattering consequences of a distant felony on the cozy familiarity of a tightly-knit, urban enclave. Mr. Eastwood and Helgeland labor at getting its feel, weaving together textures of an inhabited, Irish-Catholic neighborhood—these people know not only each others' names, but also their family histories, they attend communions and parades together in large numbers. This backdrop is solidly-built, but rarely do the scenes flow naturally or gracefully of their own casual, how-do-you-do rhythms, a singular tension is imprinted onto most every one, they're not permitted to breathe on their own. Everything is driven by the abomination we encounter in the first 10 minutes and the expectation of more bad news to come, understandably so, but there is no normal contrast for the calamity to deviate from. We're nervously puckered up from the beginning, and it doesn't let go, it's difficult to imagine ordinary life or emotions, or a veneer of happiness, ever inhabited that subculture. Critics A.O. Scott and David Edelstein argue that, despite flaws, Mystic River rises to the level of high tragedy. While that's true, it isn't particularly revealing, these people are targeted for tragedy from the get-go, it seems to be their birthright and inheritance. Even the opening scene of childhood innocence, as the boys play street hockey, has no independent flavor or drive, its staging is flat, and warped by the predestined grip of approaching doom. The sky is forebodingly overcast, the kidnapping would have been more jolting and intrusive on a sunny, friendly day. But the photography like the mood it mirrors is gray and dismal and washed out throughout, small difference between before and after, and little therein to be sacrificed, it kind of implodes.

Mystic River needs more arcs, contrasting color or prosaic blandness, comic relief, some balance. We get that with some of the ancillary characters—Brendan's leathery, wisecracking mother and the somewhat loony Eli Wallach of Loony Liquors. And between Sean and his black police partner, Whitey Powers (Laurence Fishburne, who runs with the funniest social commentaries). Both are flawless, their dynamic gives the narrative most of its energy and liveliness, but they are more observers than participants. The main characters are too knotted up in sorrow to imagine an alternative to their worlds of pain. Except for an early conversation between Jimmy and the very charming Katie, but this is itself an ominous farewell (Ms. Rossum gives the movie a brief and needed buoyancy, her subsequent absence is missed. Almost everyone else is a bummer and as far as I can tell, always was). Marcia Gay Harden is to marvel at as Celeste, Dave's quietly-spastic, tormented wife. She is a shrinking violet of twitchy fearfulness, and her measured-out unraveling is neurotically riveting. But their relationship isn't thought out very well. Dave has been living a curse since boyhood, yet she appears oblivious to it, the two are strangers. Celeste responds to Dave's bizarre ramblings about wolves and vampires, his confession about Henry and George, by tremulously asking if they have something to do with "all those years ago when you were a little boy", as though the thought had never occurred to her before. Everything in his life has something to do with that. She is abruptly rattled by his erratic behavior, as though she weren't as aware we are from the initial scenes that the man she married was, as one character labels him, "damaged goods."

Clint Eastwood forged much of his career as a trigger-happy poster boy for right-wing vigilante justice, an avenging angel whose merciless payback had audiences cheering in blood lust when the law invariably and inevitably failed the meek. His man-with-no-name westerns canonized the maverick gunman (beginning with Sergio Leone's trilogy, but The Good, The Bad and The Ugly was comically-cynical rather than didactic; more shamelessly with self-directed, somber moral parables like High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider. His kill 'em-and-let-God-sort-them-out Dirty Harry series, especially the iconic original in 1972, appalled a few critics, but they appealed to a lot of moviegoers as a wish-fulfillment alternative to many who were stunned by the metastasizing violent crime of the 1960s and angry at a liberal, Warren-influenced court system thought of as pampering criminals and freeing hardened killers on shaky and questionable technicalities. Eastwood's movies capitalized on a conservative backlash against social disorder, race riots with their arson and looting, the obscenities hurled at institutions of authority by a zealous antiwar movement; a perceived overembrace of civil liberties at the expense of the safety and dignity of law-obeying folk, a lot of whom worked hard just to get by. Many 70s TV-crime dramas relentlessly hammered the same message. Those fears and insecurities were understandable and justified, but the reaction was extreme, and did its damage. Miranda warnings were perverted into get-out-of-jail-free passes for the most dangerous classes, rather than safeguards against the abundant police abuses they were intended to be. "I know my rights" became a defiant mantra for clever sociopaths determined to outfox the man.

The whole genre encouraged a distrust and disrespect for the judicial system—it was always transparently clear to the audience, if not to bleeding-heart judges and administrative lackeys, that the accused were guilty. The phenomenally long-running and top-10 Law & Order, much as I'm addicted to it, carries on some of that tradition. Prosecuting assistant district attorneys are almost always the heroes and are almost always right; judges, caught up in the minutiae of the law, dismiss evidence on grounds that are technically correct but ethically unwise; defense attorneys, you wonder how many of them sleep at night. It is the rare episode in which the indicted turn out to be innocent. Seldom is there ambiguity about the convictions (fuzzing up the lines of reasonable doubt might be a fresh avenue to explore after 14 years), only when an episode ends in acquittal does justice appear to be miscarried. As fascinating and complex as the series can be, that theme, week after week, reinforces an assumption-of-guilt bias and validates high-handed tactics to win sentences of 25-to-life. In many real-life cases, those assumptions rest comfortably on moral high ground; in others, the cops and prosecutors get it wrong. Ware-housing incorrigible, violent offenders is a solemn state obligation. Execution can be a proportional response to heinous crimes, but the recent spectacle of DNA-based prison and death-row releases makes you wonder how deep that river runs and begs you seriously to question the consistency of our rules of evidence. Popular entertainment has been rebelling against this trend for much of my life, unless the felon in question is unquestionably pure-of-heart, like, say, a noble and beleaguered Harrison Ford in The Fugitive.

Public opinion in recent times hasn't been very receptive to seeing justice—in reality or on the big or small screen—err on the side of the defense. Nor especially has the mood been favorable to conceiving of criminals as victims—of bad luck, brutal parenting, dead-end futures—because it threatens to absolve individuals of moral responsibility for their actions. Without which, punishment is a meaningless word and the ethical foundations of the criminal code begin to buckle, an alarming prospect. We're not inclined to look for gray zones between polar categories of victim and victimizer, between deformity and evil, particularly at the pathological extremes. We feel for the battered child, but not the calculating sadist he becomes. Our hearts go out to the sodomized toddler, but grow cold after his evolution into methodical, sexual predator. Rightly so, given the inconceivable intensity of suffering they inflict and vast expanse of lives they destroy, but connecting the correlations, mapping the territory between determinism and free will can be notoriously frustrating and imprecise. Most sexually-abused children don't become sex offenders, but many compulsive rapists were once children who were repeatedly violated. Most habitually-beaten kids don't commit murder, but many serial killers were regularly, and with extreme prejudice, throttled in childhood, indoctrinated into homicidal self-loathing and explosive self-pity. On the other hand, a number of remorseless mass murderers and thrill killers, someone like Timothy McVeigh, or Leopold and Loeb, apparently had a normal upbringing. At this early point in our history, we don't have the conceptual tools, much less a thin promise of treatment or rehabilitation, to understand or deal with the monsters among us. It's virtually impossible to recognize a common humanity in them, or to want to, or to ask, could that possibly have been me? Those incapable of human empathy and contemptuous of human life will remain, for the foreseeable future, moral aliens, quite beyond redemption. Will that be the case in 50, or 100, or 200 years? Maybe not, until then, that's why we are grateful for prisons. And why we identify with punishment, because it feels equitable and, short of resurrecting the dead, brings the only closure available.

What were we talking about? Yes, Mystic River. When Mr. Eastwood entered his mature and serious phase of directing (beginning with Bird in 1988), dismissive critics were eager to welcome him into the fold. With no film moreso than this one, labeled a "historic achievement," "monumental," a "work of art." Because he has undergone a conversion, and here sees reckless vigantilism as destructive and misguided, he has been forgiven. Eastwood is treated to something of a free ride, his loving, but grandiose drama is being received as biblical fable. Eastwood has done some good work; although his native ear for dialogue is clunky and misshapen, he occasionally enlists a talented screenwriter. I liked Unforgiven, mostly because of David Webb Peoples' script, which addressed more effectively than most Westerns a key Western theme of unfounded rumors being distorted into fact, enlarged into myth and then hardened into memory. This movie, as accomplished as it is, has a tendency to suffocate on the seriousness of its vision, and to overlook some of the enhancing details which make even bad lives more complete, more lived.

Read about Mystic River in the Internet Movie Database

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