Mystic River

Directed by Clint Eastwood

Written by Dennis Lehane (novel) and Brian Helgeland (screenplay)

Rated R for language and violence

137 minutes runtime

Starring Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon and Laurence Fishburne

What a sad and tragic story for a movie with such a lyrical name.  And what a gut-wrenching performance by Sean Penn.  If you thought he was an angry man before you see this movie, you’ve got another think coming.  He looks like he could haul off and punch not only the paparazzi, but everybody else on the set, too.  And he wasn’t even the one who was kidnapped and abused as a child.  Setting a personal best for teeth-gritting, word spitting and fist clenching in a feature-length film, Penn starts out as a mad ten year old, stays mad as a shop-owning ex-con, and finishes even madder yet in this angst extravaganza directed by Clint Eastwood.  The only angry line Penn missed in the entire film was, “Make My Day.”

Cut to Tim Robbins, playing Dave Boyler, the real victim in the movie.  He was brutally kidnapped and sexually assaulted as a child.  That will mess someone up from the get-go.  But what messed up Jimmy (Penn) as a child?  We never know.  He is just like that.  OK, I don’t buy the Jimmy role, but I definitely buy the Dave role.  He is messed up as a child and grows up to be an anxious and secretive adult.  Ashamed of the hand fate dealt him as a child.  Guilty for the sins of his elders.

Of all the people Jimmy hates, his daughter’s boyfriend and the boyfriend’s deaf-mute younger brother stand out.  Is this the instinctual reaction of a father reluctant to give away his daughter, or is there something deeper going on here?  And how does that figure into the death of Jimmy’s daughter Katie on the night of her planned elopement?  Unfortunately, by the time we get the answers to those questions about Jimmy, we are so numb to Penn’s teeth-gritting, word spitting and fist clenching that we only want to see Kevin Bacon for the rest of the movie.  His studied style and pondering self-examination are more universal qualities and a chance for the audience to slow down and get introspective for a bit.  And his estranged wife?  What’s with the mystery phone calls?  Her mechanized voice comes to him, and us, explaining that something has gone terribly wrong with their relationship.  He has shut out the entire world to shut out the horrors that make up his cop existence and he has unknowingly shut out his love, too.  Thrown out the baby with the bath water into that muddy, moody, Mystic River.  We know it, but it takes the entire movie for him to figure it out.  An excellent study in the ability, or inability, to open up to others and a great supporting role by Kevin Bacon.

Laurence Fishburne plays Whitey Powers, Bacon’s detective partner who is always bringing him up short.  In a role as interesting as Whitey Powers name, he plays the logical part of the cop duo.  Always checking Kevin’s assumptions and always making him reason out his conclusions.  This provides the most fascinating inside-out look at the human mental process.  Especially the mental process of Bacon solving an apparently psychopathic murder while trying to sort out his own neurotic life at the same time.  Not to mention the hamstrung, if not unstrung, life of his childhood pal, Dave Boyle, who soon becomes a suspect in the senseless killing of Katie Markum.

So the three childhood stickball players are reunited in a triangle of tortured and dysfunctional logic, illogic and self-deception that spells doom for one of them, a living death for the second and deliverance of a sort for the third. 

With three such exceptional actors, it is hard to tell how much directing Eastwood actually had to do in this blockbuster of a movie.  But whatever he did, it worked.  He kept the four main actors on track during the complex plot when they must have been taxed to the limits by trying to understand and identify with the troubled souls whose parts they played.  Laura Linney lends excellent support to her troubled husband in the part of Jimmy’s wife Annabeth Markum.  Whereas Jimmy has been mad for life, Annabeth was turned bad by the ruthless taking of her daughter.  Even if we had a hard time believing Jimmy was so mad for so long, Annabeth was there to confirm that, yes, the denying of life to a loved one can drive a person insane.  Insane enough to want to kill in revenge.

As the plot slowly points a firmer finger at Dave Boyle as the murderer, Marcia Gay Harden comes forth with her tremendous, Oscar nominated performance as Celest, Boyle’s wife.  Just as  Laura Linney reinforces her husband’s anger, Celest shares her husband’s presumed (or assumed) guilt.  As the audience is drawn to her side, desperately seeking some kind of logical explanation, we are all drawn in to the final, tragic, climax of the movie.  We all are a part of the final failure of justice, in favor of what is depicted as a cruel twist of fate.

“Mystic River” has won or been nominated for dozens of awards this year, and is nominated for another six Oscars for best direction, picture, writing, lead actor and supporting actor and actress.  There is no question this movie is a smash in the drama department, but my own vote for best performance by Sean Penn still goes to his earlier “Dead Man Walking.”