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With a childhood tragedy that overshadowed their lives, three men are reunited by circumstance when one loses a daughter.
Sean Penn: Jimmy Markum
Eastwood's big Oscar hit along with Unforgiven(1993), Million Dollar Baby(2004), and highly nominated Letters from Iwo Jima(2006).
Mystic River(2003) is based on the bestselling novel by Dennis Lehane boasting an incredible cast to give life to the storytelling. The main leads are for Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon. Furthermore we have Laurence Fishburne, Laura Linney and Marcia Gay Harden. The movie itself is very dark and sober without substantial amounts of music used. The story and screenplay is brilliantly conceived, written sublimely and the acting results in being equally superb.
Kevin Bacon, Tim Robbins and Sean Penn play three working-class Bostonians bound by a mutual childhood trauma that defines the kind of people they've become and the kind of lives they've led. The film begins with a brief prologue--an important scene of abduction which, while far from graphic, has a sense of foreboding. We see the three as youngsters; Sean, Dave and Jimmy out playing in the street when they are confronted by a pedophile posing as a policeman whom tricks one of them into getting into a car with him and another man. The boy escapes after days of abuse but is scarred for life. Fast forward to the present to now grown men who have, it seems, gone their separate ways. Bacon is Sean Divine, an amoral homicide detective; Robbins is Dave Boyle, a man troubled by something buried in his heart; and Penn is Jimmy Markum, a former petty thief, now with underworldly connections. All three seem to still wrestle with the past, each in their own way. All the characters instantly spark our curiosity to know them, and to feel what they feel.
I really cared for these characters because they have endearing traits and the substantial relationships are inspiring and layered.
Director Clint Eastwood gives us character storytelling in the guise of art, and is powerfully, tragically real.
It should also be known that Clint Eastwood masterfully shot Mystic River in 39 days also refusing the proposal of studio executives at Warner Brothers to film in Toronto, Canada to save on expenditures. Eastwood rightly refused and pushed to have the film completely shot in Boston where the film is set.
The Brian Helgeland screenplay makes the pain that each of these men experiences vivid and palpable. The grief Jimmy feels over the loss of his beloved child, the psychological torment Dave suffers as a result of his abuse, and the bewilderment and loneliness Sean experiences from a failed marriage all become integral to this dark tale of bitterness, revenge and attempted healing. At times, we do find ourselves wishing that the script would concentrate less on the details of the murder investigation and more on the inner workings of the three main characters. Too often we feel as if we are only scratching the surface of the roiling psychological torment taking place deep in the bowels of these men.
The plotting, particularly towards the end, often feels more contrived than perhaps it needs to be, with heavy-handed ironies and obtruding parallelisms. Laura Linney, as Jimmy's second wife, has a key Lady Macbeth moment late in the film that results in being effective.
As it is, the scene seems to come out of nowhere and leaves us both bewildered and contemplating. Mystic River is an incredible display of human emotion, doubt and how the past can sometimes come back to haunt our present.
The tune that the band is playing during the parade at the end of the movie is John Philip Sousa's Semper Fidelis, which is Latin for always faithful. A fitting requiem for such a uniquely inspiring journey.
10/10
