"The friend of your youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you.
He sees in his mind a face which does not exist anymore, speaks a name – Spike, Bud, Skip, Red, Rusty, Jack, Dave – which belongs to that now non-existent face but by some inane and doddering confusion is for the moment attached to a not too happily met and boring stranger."
– Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men.
Bound by memories of a harrowing event that shaped their childhood, Jimmy (Sean Penn), Dave (Tim Robbins), and Sean (Kevin Bacon) are three such friends of youth. They have grown distant over the years but are uneasily reunited in middle age in the aftermath of a tragedy which effects them all. Guilt, suspicion, resignation, and fear mark their weather-beaten faces as they struggle with personal demons that have haunted them for years.
Mystic River begins on a quiet, ominous note. Jimmy, Sean, and Dave are shown as boys playing street hockey in their working-class Boston neighborhood. When they get bored and decide to carve their names into freshly poured cement on the sidewalk, a car pulls up and a man with a badge emerges. After scolding the boys for defacing public property, he insists that Dave enter his car so he can drive him home and inform the boy's mother of his misdeeds. Dave reluctantly climbs into the vehicle, and his life is changed forever.
He manages to escape the damp cellar he has been imprisoned and abused in four days later, but the Dave that returns to his old neighborhood is a mere shadow of the boy that he was before. "Damaged goods," one of the residents is overheard saying as the shade to Dave's bedroom window is pulled down.
Years later, Dave is a grown man with a wife, Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden), and a young son, but he is still haunted by the demons of his past, which were never discussed in the aftermath of the incident. Down the street, Jimmy, the feistiest of the boys, runs a local convenience store and, it is revealed later, has served some time in prison for robbery. Middle-age, however, seems to have agreed with him, and he devotes his time to his wife Annabeth (Laura Linney) and his three daughters. However, when his eldest (and most beloved) daughter Katie (Emmy Rossum) turns up dead, the victim of a brutal murder, Jimmy becomes consumed with rage and determined to seek vengeance on the killer. As it happens, Dave, who returned home late the night of Katie's murder with bloodstains on his clothing (which he attributes to a mugging), turns out to be a prime suspect.
To complicate things even further, one of the detectives investigating the case is Sean. Despite having distanced himself from his old friends and old neighborhood years ago, he still bears the burden of guilt for letting Dave get into the car. In addition, he is going through some personal turmoil at home – his wife, who left him six months ago with their baby in tow, calls his house frequently but refuses to ever speak into the phone.
As Sean's detective partner (Lawrence Fishburne) comments upon hearing of Katie's murder, these families are "in for a world of hurt." Indeed, the space these characters inhabit is just that, full of unspoken grief and fear. Clint Eastwood's tight, precise direction (with occasional swirling overhead shots of the city) conveys the families' pain in a way that is rarely seen in the cinema today. Eastwood is deft at building the sense of dread that leads to the revelation of Katie's death, and is equally adept at framing the film's shattering conclusion. In Mystic River, the loss of Katie and another pivotal character strikes the audience deep at its gut. When gunshots are fired in this movie or a fight breaks out, I almost felt a collective wince from my fellow moviegoers, a rare sensation given the omnipresent violence on hand at the multiplex.
The performances are also universally excellent, with Penn and Robbins tackling two difficult roles with their usual aplomb. Marcia Gay Harden is moving as a wife torn between loyalty to her husband and increasing suspicion of his guilt, and Linney is chilling as a modern Lady MacBeth.
On its own, Mystic River works as a powerful genre movie. Eastwood builds a riveting mystery around Katie's death, and the results turn out to be shocking. However, this film is also very much a product of its time, and thus provides a wider commentary (both unsettling and insightful) on life in George W. Bush's America.
The American obsession with an eye for an eye (evidenced in our persistent use of capital punishment), our collective need to find a scapegoat for violent acts perpetrated against us, and above all, our insistence on keeping up appearances while sweeping unpleasantries under the rug are all issues addressed in this film, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly. The movie's final scene, set at an all-American hometown parade – with Annabeth standing steadfast alongside Jimmy, determined to prevent any act, however vile, from sullying her family's happy image – is among the more moving and disturbing in recent memory.
Copyright © Beth Gilligan 2002-2005
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