CINEMA: FILMS TO REMEMBER

Mystic River Rating :


Details: 2003, USA, Drama, cert 15, 137 minutes. Dir: Clint Eastwood.  With: Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne, Marcia Gay Harden, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins.  Summary: Self-doubt, ethical compromise and moral ambiguity are on the cards when three childhood friends are reunited following the murder of one's daughter Clint Eastwood's latest movie as a director is a stolid, masculine thriller bearing the lineaments of tragedy - something classical or even biblical. It's a film where work, good and bad, is done by men, with women getting to play the tremulous wives or daughters. Kevin Bacon, Sean Penn and Tim Robbins are childhood buddies from a blue-collar Boston neighbourhood whose friendship is torn apart by a grisly crime that happened when they were boys. They grow up and drift apart to become respectively a cop, a reformed hoodlum, and a moodily difficult loner, but a new and even more horrible crime intertwines their destinies once again.-Peter Bradshaw. This is a film with no small opinion of its own importance as an exposition of real men's emotional lives; its soundtrack strives for grandeur and there are plenty of giant, overhead shots of the principals and their hometown, as if from the gods' Olympian viewpoint. Its muscular conviction often commands assent, especially when it comes to Sean Penn's very strong performance and Kevin Bacon's no less impressive and characteristically un-showy contribution. Robbins' twitchy persona, all drooping shoulders and neurotic glances, is a little harder to take, though he has one outstanding scene in a police interrogation room. Eastwood's drama is substantial, but monolithic, like a handsome, well-made piece of traditional American furniture.

Not many directors do their best work in their sixties and seventies. But Clint Eastwood, who has been a major and beneficent force as actor, director and producer for more than 30 years, has made few better films than the beautifully crafted Mystic River, directed in his seventy-third year. Several things set it apart from most of his other movies. The first is that the setting is working-class Boston. Something of an adversary of the East Coast establishment, Eastwood prefers the West and the South for his settings. I can think of only two previous pictures of his that are set in New York and New England, and both are about outsiders - the Arizona cop visiting Manhattan to pick up a fugitive criminal in Coogan's Bluff and Charlie Parker coming to New York from Kansas City in Bird. Another thing is that in the majority of his movies the antagonists have been raging psychopaths. But like the western Unforgiving, which brought him Oscars for best film and best direction in 1992, there are no born villains in Mystic River. Everyone is the creation of the community in which they were reared and the moral struggle their background engendered. The movie is adapted by Brian Helgeland (who wrote the screenplay for Eastwood's last picture, Blood Work) from a novel by Dennis Lehane, and it begins in the late 1970s when three Irish-American schoolboys, Jimmy Markum, Sean Devine and Dave Boyle, are playing street hockey near their houses. When their ball goes down a sewer they're distracted by a square of wet cement on the sidewalk, and the dynamic Jimmy suggests scratching their names in it. He's first off followed by Sean, but Dave has got only as far as the first two letters of his name when a police car pulls up and a plainclothes detective starts questioning them.  

Not many directors do their best work in their sixties and seventies. But Clint Eastwood, who has been a major and beneficent force as actor, director and producer for more than 30 years, has made few better films than the beautifully crafted Mystic River, directed in his seventy-third year. Several things set it apart from most of his other movies. The first is that the setting is working-class Boston.