GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 10/8/03)



At one point in this almost overwhelming film—an elegy in the guise of a thriller—Tim Robbins's character muses on what it feels like to commit an act of violence against another human being. "You feel . . . alien," he mutters, so knotted in pain that it seems as if the words are being strangled out of him. Witnessing that moment is a wrenching experience, but once outside of it, I was able to connect it to something another character in a film directed by Clint Eastwood said, a speech beginning, "It's a hell of a thing, killing a man . . . "

Mystic River, which Eastwood directed from Brian Helgeland's adaptation of the Dennis Lehane novel, is perhaps the greatest, most affecting articulation of the theme Eastwood has been exploring since 1990's White Hunter Black Heart: how violence—real violence, not movie violence—perpetrated and experienced, can erode and/or obliterate the human soul. Unforgiven, the film in which Eastwood himself makes the above-cited speech, was rightfully honored with several Oscars for its superb treatment of this inexhaustible theme. I dare say that Mystic River ought to be similarly honored.

River is the story of three childhood friends, Jimmy, Dave, and Sean, from a hardscrabble Boston neighborhood whose lives are shaken to the core when, in the wake of some mischief, Dave is deceived into entering the wrong car with the wrongest of adults. In adulthood, Dave (Robbins) is as damaged as goods get, but still trying to keep it together; he's got a wife and a young boy of his own. Sean (Kevin Bacon) is a detective with some cloudy domestic troubles, and Jimmy (Sean Penn) is a former hood who's now keeping his head down, so it seems, running a corner grocery store. When Jimmy's teen daughter turns up brutally murdered, the onetime king of the block goes into swift action, stepping on Sean's toes and becoming more and more suspicious of Dave, who had the ill forture of being one of the last people to see Jimmy's daughter alive.

Eastwood handles the police procedural and whodunit aspects of the plot with his usual sure touch. One of the pleasures of watching an Eastwood-directed film is his straightforward, unornamental style of storytelling—he never tries to pump things up with the kind of slow-motion shots that nobody but Martin Scorsese knows how to deploy correctly, for instance. But the real strength of Mystic River is what's underneath the story—the hearts and souls of the characters, which are fearlessly and thoroughly plumbed by the cast. Penn is magnificent, and Bacon is so good you wish he'd stop cheapening himself by turning up on those VH1 pop-cult blabberfests. But Robbins, who too often lets a kind of surly glibness creep into his acting, is incredible here. Slouchy and almost gray-skinned, he's a guy who knows his life is over and painfully can't figure out why he's still breathing.

The picture, of course, is about more than violence—it's about choices, about family, and about loyalty. But hardly in the ways you expect, or are used to. I was taken aback, and devasted, by the uncomfortable truths that hit home in the film's hard-to-shake coda, when the hushed certitude and wicked fortitude displayed by certain characters are, if anything, more terrifying than the screams and gunshots that came before.