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Clint makes another masterpiece with Mystic River
BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
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Mystic River.
Directed by Clint Eastwood. Screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane. With Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Marcia Gay Harden, Laurence Fishburne, Laura Linney, and Emmy Rossum. A Warner Bros. release. 137 minutes. Opens October 8 at theaters to be announced.
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Each of the three childhood friends who grow up to become the main characters of Mystic River brings the film a particular style of revelation. When it centers on Dave (Tim Robbins), the film is filled with gaps, enigmas, and unpredictable plunges into the past (in glimpses of the cell where, as a child, he was imprisoned by two pedophiles, and of his escape through the woods). Seen from the point of view of Sean (Kevin Bacon), a Massachusetts State Police detective, the story is impersonal and flat. But Sean’s story, too, is riddled with gaps: the sudden emptinesses of the mute phone calls he gets from his estranged wife. Jimmy (Sean Penn), a small kingpin in the working-class Boston neighborhood where the film takes place, introduces a third tone, aggressive and bitter, and an obsession with visibility and control, as when he surveys two youths shopping in his corner convenience store, or later when he goes into a funeral-parlor basement to view the lifelike body of his murdered daughter, Katie (Emmy Rossum). From the narrative relay it sets up among the three men, Mystic River draws two great advantages: first, the power to evoke the complexity of the relationships among the three and the sense that, as Katie’s death forces Jimmy to recognize, fate has linked them forever; second, enough freedom from their perspectives and private hells to gain a privileged view of a vast, intricate human disaster. This is the key to director Clint Eastwood’s strategy throughout the film. He never seeks to torment the audience with what can’t be represented: the abuse of 11-year-old Dave by the two perverts (if this isn’t shown, it’s not just from Eastwood’s sense of decorum, but because the details of the abuse will escape representation in Dave’s memory) or the death agony of Katie (which the viewer, with Jimmy, is left to imagine). He’s more concerned with the pattern that links the characters. The intelligence of the screenplay (adapted by Brian Helgeland — closely, I’m told — from Dennis Lehane’s novel) lies in its constant dual orientation toward the past (Dave’s abuse) and the future (what Jimmy will do when he catches Katie’s killer). Every event in the narrative is linked to these two points and draws multiple resonances from them. Eastwood’s brilliance lies in keeping these resonances in play throughout the film. This is partly a matter of touches that might pass for mere narrative vigor, like the helicopter shots that give both forward momentum and a sense of destiny, or the audacious (and successful) crosscutting between two scenes of climactic violence taking place in different parts of town. But it’s also a matter of Eastwood’s love of complexity, of contrast, and of scenes built on tensions among characters with competing motives. During a cafeteria-booth discussion after he identifies his daughter’s body, Jimmy tries, with difficulty, to mourn, while his wife (Laura Linney) supports him and defends him. Meanwhile, of the two police investigators, Sean must balance concern for his bereaved former friend and the desire to solve the case, while his partner (Laurence Fishburne), suspicious of Sean’s tact, gets tough. The struggles among, and inside, the four people are clear and compelling. Something must be said about the richness of Mystic River, which is at once a gripping psychological study, an astute piece of ethnography, and a bleak and ironic tragedy. All these aspects of the film are served by the meticulous visual detailing, which economically expresses the combination of pride, secretiveness, and decay that is the key to the characters. Every scene takes place either at night or under a milky sky that projects a frail light through the curtains of homes. (In a sinister living-room scene between Dave and his fearful wife — played by the excellent Marcia Gay Harden — the pale midday light scarcely gets three inches past the window before it diffuses into darkness.) The sense of a tight-knit, parochial community of people stubbornly clinging together under this dismal light, making and burying an unrecorded history of crimes and punishments, colors the whole story and determines the ending, one of the most ambitious and powerful in recent American film.
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