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Mystic River

Posted by clarkjohnsen (R) on October 15, 2003 at 07:56:05

That's the name of an actual river in Boston, and the name of a novel by Dennis Lehane set in the environs of that river. Now, a major motion picture as well. The reviews have been excellent, but here's the thang: Once I decide to see a movie I stop reading the reviews. Oh I save them for afterwards, but I want my judgement to be my own, and fresh.

So here is Duncan Shepherd's review, which I include because it disappears forever after today. In keeping with policy, I read only the first three paragraphs and stopped when I reached this section, which is as follows:

"Even so, I feel less urge and less urgency to say something about it [Mystic River] now that the word has gotten out; now that the media mill has begun to grind it up; now that everyone under the sun knows what it's about, and knows that just as Unforgiven was an act of penance for the body counts in Eastwood's Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns as well as in his self-directed imitation Leones (High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider), the current film may be viewed as..."

No thank you Duncan. I'll get back to you later.

But I assume that he is bemoaning the fact that it's damn difficult not to be swamped with opinions before seeing a film these days. The most anyone can do, is what I do.

clark

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A Spurt of Growth

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At no point in his career would there have been room here for Eastwood the actor.

Review by Duncan Shepherd
Published October 9, 2003

Duncan Shepherd dips into Mystic River

Ideally I should be writing about the Coen brothers' Intolerable Cruelty this week. But as it was not screened for the press far enough ahead of Friday's opening, and as I had already seen and written about Clint Eastwood's Mystic River as far back as the Cannes Film Festival, and as the latter opens in the media hubs this week and will reach our little burg next Wednesday (or one day before the next issue of the paper), I feel justified in flip-flopping them.
I would not, however, want to bore you with my personal epiphany, otherwise known as the moment of "duh," on seeing Mystic River a second time and realizing that if you take away all the external circumstances -- take away the Côte d'Azur, take away the Nouveau Palais, take away the limos and the red carpet, take away the regal figure of Eastwood himself, take away the buzzing swarm of the world press -- it's still the same movie here as it was there. In the dark, you can tell no difference. How fortunate for all of us. The same whimpering gratitude I felt toward it while on a diet of Ozon, Sokurov, Von Trier, etc., I can feel again when back on a more normal diet of Ridley Scott, Mike Figgis, Danny DeVito, etc., even Woody Allen, John Sayles, Sofia Coppola, etc.

Even so, I feel less urge and less urgency to say something about it now that the word has gotten out; now that the media mill has begun to grind it up; now that everyone under the sun knows what it's about, and knows that just as Unforgiven was an act of penance for the body counts in Eastwood's Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns as well as in his self-directed imitation Leones (High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider), the current film may be viewed as an act of penance for the lone-wolf vigilantism of his Dirty Harry urban shoot-'em-ups: a kind of cleansed Harry. There was something wonderful about discovering this for myself. And any part I play in depriving you of such discovery calls for some penance of my own.

What it's about: chance, fate, doom; scarred souls and endless repercussions; violence begetting violence. Three boyhood pals (you will have no trouble picking out the one who grows up to be Sean Penn, a perfect match, and the persistent Red Sox cap will tell you which one was Tim Robbins) are playing in the street in the Buckingham Flats section of Boston, writing their names on the sidewalk in wet cement, when they are interrupted by a man driving an unmarked car, flashing a badge. The one of the three who -- by chance -- lives on another block, the one whose name will be left forever unfinished in the cement ("DA--"), is ordered into the backseat and spirited away to be held captive in a basement and raped repeatedly. (The implication of a Catholic clergyman in this crime adds nothing but lazy-mindedness.) Broken apart by one tragedy, the three will be brought back together by another tragedy in adulthood: the murder of one of their daughters, a case in which another of them will be the lead investigator and the third a prime suspect.

There is no room here for Eastwood the actor. The bereaved and vengeful father, an ex-con with connections to the neighborhood enforcers, aptly called the Savage brothers, is Sean Penn. The prime suspect, and the indelibly marked molestation victim, "the boy who escaped from wolves," now with a boy of his own, is Tim Robbins. (As I noted at the end of last spring: "liberal" casting by a filmmaker beloved of conservatives, and highly emotional, tearful, unstoical, and un-Eastwoody acting, to boot: at no point in his career would there have been room here for Eastwood the actor.) The detective is Kevin Bacon, a world-weary and very ordinary plainclothes- man, with no Dirty Harry aspirations as an avenging angel, partnered with an equally ordinary black cop named "Whitey," the hefty Laurence Fish-burne.

This is in all ways an extraordinary film, the more so because Eastwood the director has seemed to be coasting awhile, almost rolling to a dead stop in his detective film of a summer ago, Blood Work. It would be wrong to credit the change to Eastwood's absence from the screen: he was already coasting in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, where he likewise stayed behind the camera. But it would be wrong, too, to give the impression that an end to his coasting meant a pickup in his speed.

Mystic River maintains the leisurely pace which is as natural to Eastwood as his stilt-like gait. It is a measured pace, a pace for literally taking the measure of things, sizing them up. And it combines in a most meaningful way with his slightly slanted, slightly sidelong view of the world. Eastwood tends to direct on diagonals, with the plane of the composition tilted backwards like a transom window or angled horizontally like a casement window. This, by the rules of Cinematography 101, will automatically create lines of tension, between one character and another or between the characters and the spectator. Eastwood's lines of tension are never extreme, never stretched to the snapping point à la Orson Welles, and they're firmly tethered to the ground -- the camera solidly planted -- so as to prevent any threat of teetering or tipping. Together with his unhurried pace, this diagonalism fosters a feeling of formality, an air of stateliness, a climate for contemplation. The film scarcely looks or feels like what passes for a "thriller" these days. And indeed, although it is "thrilling" on a level far above the reach of stuff like Out of Time and Cold Creek Manor, it is a thriller only by technicality.

One of the more extraordinary things about it is that, while formulated as a murder mystery, it is not narrowly focussed on the investigation, but divides its time more or less evenly among the characters, and expands continuously into the specific milieu, the complex personal relationships, the affected and ongoing lives, in fact life in general, life with a capital "L." The strong cast -- besides those already mentioned, Laura Linney, Marcia Gay Harden, Emmy Rossum, Thomas Guiry, Kevin Chapman, and, in one bristling scene as Penn's father-in-law, Kevin Conway -- keep pairing off in different ways, as in some sort of round-robin tournament, so that we see each of them in new and different lights.

Another extraordinary thing, not only for a thriller these days but for any film at any time, is the sustained tone of lamentation, underscored by the churchy musical theme composed by Eastwood himself (albeit orchestrated by his trusted collaborator, Lennie Niehaus). The retributive anger never supplants the sorrow; the release never comes. And lastly, it is almost shameful to have to include among the extraordinary things the classical clarity and economy of the storytelling, from the well-ordered presentation of characters and clues to every little fine point and loving touch: the subtle visual emphasis on Robbins's suspiciously skinned knuckles, the painful private moment when Penn lays out his daughter's funeral dress on top of the white sheet in the mortuary, the portentous replay in adulthood of the molestation victim's forlorn look out the back window of a receding car.

Admittedly, the outcome of the case depends upon a fortuitous coincidence that reeks of mystery-making for its own sake: a previously unrevealed second murder on the same night. Yet the solution to the original murder is not overly tricksy, is perhaps even (to some, not to me) overly obvious; and the mood of the moment in any case is not one of parlor games and "gotcha." The honest -- the aggrieved -- the penitent -- emotionalism of the film makes up for either the fortuitousness or the obviousness, as necessary.

It is mandatory to mention that the film was adapted from a novel by Dennis Lehane, and I confess that it sent me scurrying to the library to check out another of his books, one of the Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro private-eye series, and I further confess that I found it to be perfectly dreadful: embarrassing characters, unswallowable plotting, unspeakable dialogue. (Just as astoundingly, the scriptwriter, Brian Helgeland, is also the writer and director of the godforsaken The Order.) Lehane's book version of Mystic River, not a part of a series, may have been a more ambitious effort, a stab at the Great American Novel. I don't know. But I was reminded nevertheless of the salvation job that Eastwood performed on The Bridges of Madison County, still his personal peak in my opinion, after which he started to coast.

And that brings us back to the first extraordinary thing about the film: its maker's capacity for self-renewal and growth. We have, for a nearby point of comparison, the tired and tiresome new work from Woody Allen, a hyphenate star-director strangely parallel to Eastwood in the length and productivity of his career, in his standoffishness from screen fashion, and in his unimpaired ability to make his own sort of film in his own sort of style, regardless of box-office performance -- not to mention in his taste for jazz and for obscenely younger women. (Specific point of conjunction: the use of jazz vocalist Diana Krall, on screen in Anything Else and, four years ago, over the closing credits in True Crime.) When Eastwood, now seventy-three, finally passes from the scene, one wonders who in the Hollywood Establish- ment will have the clout, the weight, the maturity, the motivation, to carry on in this line of endeavor. One wonders, and shudders.

Copyright 2003, San Diego Reader

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