Mystic River Review
by Karina Montgomery (karina AT cinerina DOT com)November 24th, 2003
Mystic River
Matinee with Snacks
While the film itself is wonderully understated, you can't sit through it without thinking to yourself, "I smell Oscar." It doesn't feel like it was made specifically to win anyone anything (like Nell felt like). It feels like someone found a story that has resonance on multiple levels, stocked the fridge with strong, reliable actors with plenty of their own multiple levels, and let the games begin.
We meet the eerily well cast children who will grow up to be Kevin Bacon, Sean Penn, and Tim Robbins having a nice mellow urban childhood. As soon as the wolf comes on screen, you know all you need to know; director Clint Eastwood doesn't feel the modern day need to belabor the point as to the tragedy that drops into the lives of these kids and changes forever their collective futures.
The movie is drenched with portent, and for a good hour I was unable to put my finger on where it was coming from. The plot develops nice and slowly, but not in a poky or lazy fashion, so I don't know where this numbing dread is coming from. Eastwood's thriller score and Tom Stern's exquisite cinematography give us the mood before we even know there is a mood to be had. Stern was the chief lighting technician on such sublimely lit films as American Beauty and Road to Perdition. It shows. I don't know much about lighting but I could feel how good it was.
The drama finally "begins" (insofar as the modern-day plot line is concerned) late in the film, and it builds with such tautness and delicacy that I have to admire it. The main players are Sean Penn as the local tough guy and Tim Robbins as the tall, powerful, yet helpless shell of a man after his victimization so long ago. These men give simply fantastic performances that defy description - it is the kind of work you have to just sit back and feel, like Toni Collette in the Sixth Sense or Bill Murray in Lost in Translation. I can't gve you any plot information, though by now surely everyone has seen this film, because the slow unfolding of it is too rewarding at its own pace to ruin with information.
Robbins does the best work I have seen him do in forever, his baby face on a man's body couldn't be more heart rending. His vulnerability and terror and the defenses he manufactured over the years are tangible. Penn is a man with two hearts, one, a cold, calculating one with many layers of defense, and one, swollen with love for his family and the extended family of the neighborhood. We can practically see them collide in his chest and we ache with him.
Is the movie about a mysterious murder? Is it about the many levels of complicity and perpetuation of violence, or is it the tale about men who continually grasp at one moment they can never change again, until a more immutable moment renders that past one irrelevant? Is violence an act of deliberation and will or one of programming that we cannot override? You get to decide, and you will probably change your mind several times after watching the film. One thing you will not change your mind on is how undeniably powerful these men are in portraying this story.
During the blatant and abrupt epilogue, I was confused by Lady Macbeth speech by Laura Linney but it doesn't feel like they left something out, it just feels like something added on. This is old school "drama" with a capitol D that Hollywood people are afraid to do nowadays - Eastwood studiously avoids what could have been lurid or sensationalistic and instead delves into humanity or the lack thereof.
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These reviews (c) 2003 Karina Montgomery. Please feel free to forward but credit the reviewer in the text. Thanks. You can check out previous reviews at:
http://www.cinerina.com and http://ofcs.rottentomatoes.com - the Online Film Critics Society http://www.hsbr.net/reviews/karina/listing.hsbr - Hollywood Stock Exchange Brokerage Resource
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
