Mystic River

Re-watching Mystic River was part of my ridiculous project of listing the top 100 films of the past decade. I had seen it a couple times before, but not for a few years. I knew it was a fantastic film. The question was, how fantastic? The answer: it might be perfect. I have decided that it is my favorite Clint Eastwood film (and there are a lot of good ones) and it deserves a spot near the very top of my decade list.

It’s a film about three boyhood friends who each take very separate roads into adulthood. The turning point for this division comes at the very beginning of the movie. Jimmy, Sean and Dave are playing street hockey when a child molestor impersonating a police officer pulls up and forces Dave into his car. Dave escapes after several days. When these boys become adults they speculate that this incident is what set their lives in motion, what set them apart from each other.

We then meet the three boys as men. Jimmy (Sean Penn) is an ex-con with a wife (Laura Linney) and two little girls, as well as a 19-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, Katie (Emmy Rossum). Sean (Kevin Bacon) is a police detective who gets strange, silent phone calls from his wife who has recently left him. Dave (Tim Robbins) is a handyman with a wife (Marcia Gay Harden) and a young son.

Then a second inciting event happens: Katie is murdered. One extraordinary thing about this film is that, even at this early point in the film, we are deeply involved in these characters’ lives. We have seen the love that Jimmy has for his daughter and we feel part of his pain. It would have been so easy to have filmed this in a detached CSI mystery/thriller fashion, but Eastwood and the actors convey such depth and pain that we are more concerned with the emotions of the characters than potential plot twists.

I find myself at a loss as to what the plot of Mystic River is actually about. We follow the three main characters in the aftermath of the murder. We see Jimmy’s grief, we see Sean hard at work trying to find Katie’s murderer, and we see Dave become more and more affected by what happened to him when he was a child. And a bunch of other stuff happens that I am not about to ruin for anyone who hasn’t seen the film. I think this is the sort of movie you discuss after you’ve seen it.

I can say, however, that the acting is superb. There is not a false step among the entire cast. With Mystic River, Eastwood shows his uncanny ability to work with actors. Not that he didn’t have plenty of talent to work with from the beginning. Sean Penn is painfully good as a grieving father out for revenge. This may be his best role ever. Same for Robbins. And Bacon, for that matter. I think he gets overlooked in discussions of the acting in this movie.

If you have not seen this film, stop whatever you are doing and go see it. Even if you’re delivering a baby.