Mystic River
Rated: R
Runtime: 2 hours, 17 minutes
Directed by: Clint Eastwood
Starring:
Sean Penn - Jimmy Markum
Tim Robbins - Dave Boyle
Kevin Bacon - Sean Devine
Laurence Fishburne - Sgt. Whitey Powers
Marcia Gay Harden - Celeste Boyle
Laura Linney - Annabeth Markum
Most of the nation’s critics have hailed it as one of the best films of 2003. Its powerhouse cast gives incredible performances that should win this year’s Screen Actors Guild awards and next year’s for good measure. It shows off Clint Eastwood’s talented direction (as we kindly turn away from Blood Work and True Crime). It’s a twisty thriller…blahdy, blahdy, blah. While Mystic River is a good film, the amount of hype and praise and acclaim has soured it for me a bit.
To be sure, there’s a solid premise at work. Three childhood friends, Jimmy (Sean Penn), Dave (Tim Robbins), and Sean (Kevin Bacon), are reunited after the brutal murder of Jimmy’s teenage daughter. However, time has washed away the innocence of these men. Dave was abducted, sexually abused, and managed to escape but the emotional scars have never really healed. Jimmy has been to jail and while he’s managed to get his life back on track and raise a family, he can still call on the Savage Brothers to do his dirty work for him. As for Sean, he’s now a cop but because his other two friends have problems, it only seems fair that Sean have to deal with a separation from his wife.
Obviously, the stage is set for what could be an incredibly strong character drama, and instead, the audience is treated to a two-hour episode of Law & Order. Instead of taking time to delve into the more interesting characters of Jimmy and Dave, the film spends more time on the investigation done by Sean and his partner Whitey Powers (played by Larry Fishburne, which is funny because I'm pretty sure he's not white). While the film does try to give time to Jimmy and Dave, these characters have secrets which are so obvious that only the strong performances by Penn and Robbins saves these characters from being laughable. Honestly, Jimmy tends to be morose, brooding, and intense so you know he’s up to no good and Dave is always acting shifty and spouting nonsense that it seemed like he would earn himself the nickname Red Herring. So instead of fleshing out these potentially interesting characters, the film is content to trod along the tired whodunnit path and if you can’t figure out the killer halfway through the film, then I suggest you go home and break out the Encyclopedia Brown books. The film simply spends way too much time on the procedural and while Bacon and Fishburne are good, they’re not the strongest characters of this film.
So while the procedural aspect really does sour the film for me, most of the other aspects of the film help to elevate the work to the level of a fairly decent drama. As said before, Penn and Robbins are fantastic. Tom Stern’s cinematography is naturalistic yet overcast and foreboding. Eastwood’s music is sorrowful and mysterious. The relationships between the characters in the film are pretty strong, except between Jimmy and his wife Annabeth (played by Laura Linney, who’s in the film for maybe a sum total of eight minutes) where it feels like there was a giant chunk of the story which got cut out for one reason or another.
While Mystic River did not work well for me, many others seemed to enjoy it. At the very least, you should give it a shot just so you can have an opinion on the Oscars it may win or lose on February 29th.
Words by
Matt Goldberg
2.19.04