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In Reply to: Mystic River is filed with The English Patient posted by Bulkington on March 15, 2005 at 09:45:58:
MR has a compelling story line and fine acting, through probably 2/3rds of it. Then...the Sean Penn character goes over the top, and those two HORRIBLE "acting" brothers (the goons) actually get paragraphs of lines to speak! Bacon is competent but somehow he doesn't have the gravitas to stand up to Penn. Surprisingly, Roberts does the finest job of acting---too bad he directed.
The climactic scene in the bar was so overly long and so inexpertly directed and edited that all manner of menace was absent, likewise its coda in the river.
But PUHLEEEEZE don't equate it with The English Patient. I'm still waiting to hear what the hell the Indian fellow with the rock star hair had to do with anything (except provide beefcake, that is).
Follow Ups:
Fine acting doesn't change the fact that both films are melodramatic pabulum directed at people for whom that sort of ill-lit overseriousness is the uppermost limit of 'culture.'Mystic River doesn't really have a 'storyline'--just a bunch of people sitting around looking pensive and saying Grim Working Class Folk sorts of things--until the last twenty minutes of the movie, at which point it unspools possibly the cheapest plot 'twist' short of 'the butler did it.' No one in that movie at any point acts like anyone in any of those situations would actually act, and if you ever met anyone as brow-furrowedly over-sincere as any of those 'characters,' you'd laugh in their face. It's all cheap bait. And the last five minutes of the movie are completely surreal, what with the sudden epidemic of inhumanity among all the characters.
Just on the pomposity of the scores alone they deserve to be linked.
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What are you referring to when you say that Bacon did not have the gravitas to stand up to Penn? The end scene, when both of them are on the street watching the parade, Bacon knows that Penn is responsible for exacting his revenge. And knows that Penn was wrong, as does Penn, at that point. I suspect that Bacon does nothing because he realizes that (A) Penn was reacting out of anger for loosing his daughter, and not because he was a common thief, and therefore likely to do it again, (B) Because they are old friends, came from the same place, and Bacon happened to make a respectable life for himself, while Penn became a street thug, creating feelings of guilt, whether justified or not, and this was his payback, (C) arresting him would accomplish nothing, except take dad away from his family, knowing that Penn must live with what he did, and (D) Robbins had been tortured from his experience since he was a child, and maybe his torment was over. All, some, or none may apply. Take your pick. But I doubt Bacon's failure to act was because of a lack of gravitas.This is what I admire about Eastwood's recent work. He does not provide the answers, and does not provide the big payoff. Lesser directors would have had some climactic arrest of Penn, police lowering the boom, then the film ends. Some directors think that we need resolution. We need the arrest of the killer. That is justice. Neat and tidy. Eastwood realizes that tidiness does not always happen, and sometimes things just fade away, leaving more questions than answers. Maybe that is why, despite his box office cache, he is relegated to largely raising funds for his movies.
from reading the book and seeing the film a couple of times is that Bacon knows Penn killed Robbins but can't PROVE it, thus the symbolical pistol shot with his hand as if to say "I've got you and one day I'll prove it".
the Dirty series that he'd become the king of the anti-heroes, beginning with his portrayal in Unforgiven.
By "gravitas," I simply meant that Bacon doesn't project, himself not his character, the power to stand up to a Penn. He's a good actor to toy with Tom Cruise, but Penn's another level altogether.
adfgh
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