Mystic River (DVD 2004)

MYSTIC RIVER merited Clint Eastwood an Oscar for Best Director, but perhaps not Best Picture because it concludes with too many loose ends and thus fails as a conventional morality play. A rough justice of sorts was at least served in Clint's Oscar-winning UNFORGIVEN.
In the opening sequence, three boyhood pals - Jimmy, Dave and Sean - are playing on the streets of Boston. Jimmy goads the other two into defacing a freshly-poured square of concrete sidewalk. A car pulls up, apparently carrying two plain-clothes cops, one of whom berates the lads for their antisocial behavior. Ultimately, Dave is carried off by the police, ostensibly to be driven home and reported to his mother. In fact, the officers are child molesters in disguise, and Dave is cruelly abused in a cellar for four days before he escapes.

Decades later, the three still live in Boston. Jimmy (Sean Penn), now a tough-guy ex-con, runs a neighborhood convenience grocery. He's married with three daughters, the oldest being Katie (Emmy Rossum), the apple of his eye. Dave (Tim Robbins), a handyman, is married with one son. Sean (Kevin Bacon) is a homicide investigator with the Boston PD.

Late one night, Dave arrives home with a mangled hand and a superficial slash across his stomach. He claims he was attacked by a mugger, and in the ensuing struggle perhaps killed his assailant. The next morning, the police receive report of an abandoned car with a bloodied interior and a bullet hole in the driver's seat back. The vehicle turns out to be Katie's, and her corpse is soon found in a nearby park. She's been brutally beaten and fatally shot after, apparently, being pursued by her killer. Sean is assigned as lead investigator.

Dave's wife Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden) scans the dailies expecting to find report of the dead mugger. Such never appears, and a corrosive doubt eats at her mind. Whom did Dave really kill?

The three principals in this gritty, take-no-prisoners piece (Penn, Robbins, and Bacon) give three noteworthy performances. Those of Penn and Robbins are particularly excellent, and merited Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor nominations respectively.

The core of MYSTIC RIVER is not the procedural identification of Katie's killer. Indeed, there are glaring logic lapses as both Jimmy and Sean seek the answer. Moreover, the involvement of the latter and the BPD serve only as the socially acceptable and expected counterpoint to a plot that has little to do with a legal resolution to the crime. Rather, it's an unrelentingly dark tale of deep emotional disturbances resulting from severe childhood trauma, and the potential for extra-legal, primal violence inherent in the philosophy "a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do". I found the film's ending unsatisfying because of its loose ends. But that's not overly important, because the unsettling nature of Eastwood's message is embodied in the Getting There and not the Destination.

You might think that MYSTIC RIVER is a Guy Flick. But that the female of the species also has a role to play in tribalism is indicated by the message given Jimmy by his wife Annabeth (Laura Linney) in the last minutes of the film. One tough babe, that.

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