Mystic River The violent bear it away
Cooper, Rand Richards
Rand Richards Cooper UNFORGIVEN IN BOSTON Eastwood's 'Mystic River' Three current box-office titans raise the question: How do you like your movie violence? As schlocky entertainment (the...
...the last, wordless glance from his daughter that Jimmy keeps coming back to...
...As schlocky entertainment (the shamelessly gruesome Texas Chainsaw Massacre...
...Mystic River continues his project of complicating the idea of violence with which he is associated...
...The gun that killed Jimmy's daughter, for instance, turns out to have a history-its owner was Ray Harris, father of Katie's boyfriend, who used it in a crime twenty years ago, when he was running with a gang headed by...Jimmy Markham...
...the tribal and territorial underpinnings of ethnic urban life...
...These obsessions provide a showcase for some superb acting...
...each twist reveals character and opens up another thematic level...
...In the 1970s, the Dirty Harry movies brought his mythic Man-with-No-Name gun-slinger to the streets of the city, fashioning a cinematic prop for neoconser-vatism in its vision of an urban world corrupted by liberal permissiveness- by too much talk-and requiring a strong silent man wielding lethal righteousness to dean it up...
...Fast forward a quarter-century...
...Far from romancing the silence of the avenger, Mystic River is haunted by the silence of the victim: the letters in that stone square of sidewalk, where Dave's name remains an unfinished DA------, his identity forever interrupted, his innocent boyhood quashed...
...and Dave (Tim Robbins), the molesters' victim, now a married man and father shuffling through life with an air of profound disquiet...
...It is deeply satisfying to contemplate the turn Eastwood's perspective has taken...
...specific questions of guilt and innocence invoke larger ones...
...and, of course, the silence of the dead...
...Bit by bit events disclose what Jimmy has atoned for in his past, and hint ominously at what he may have to atone for again...
...It's tantalizing, at another level, to see the film as Eastwood's own act of atonement...
...Mystic River approaches the gravity of tragedy, then shrugs its shoulders, collapsing Jimmy's torment into mere swagger...
...we see him caged in grief but also in a dark way liberated, positioned for a possible reconciliation with his own capacity for murderous vengeance...
...At every turn Mystic River uncovers debts that must be paid...
...The offense hits the neighborhood with a sense of irreparable violation...
...They're scrawling their names in the wet cement of a fresh sidewalk repair when a car pulls up, and a pair of seedy-looking men-one flashes a badge-orders one of the boys into the car...
...A king does whatever he has to do," she tells her husband...
...The project goes back at least to Unforgiven (1992), where dishing out lethal vengeance occasioned not exultation but degradation and shame...
...The invitation was at some level an ugly one, offering a kind of relief that was anything but cathartic...
...Everyone Celia Wren but us...
...Even the director's minor entertainments of late, such as True Crime and Blood Work, concern themselves with the recipients of violence and with their suffering...
...Eastwood made his fame as an avatar of violence, the angel of death and vengeance in such Westerns as High Plains Drifter and Hang 'Em High...
...it conveys something like the wisdom of age...
...It was the relief of having someone beat up, on your behalf, the punks and thugs who have been scaring you: the exultation of the coward hiding behind his bullying angel...
...The film is grounded in powerful themes: class warfare...
...Late in his career, Eastwood seems to be thinking, as presidents do, of how history will remember him...
...Penn, his shopkeeper's half-lens glasses sitting awkwardly on his face, plays a man coiled in barely restrained violence...
...Looks like damaged goods to me," one cop remarks, as the boy is returned home...
...The men are not cops, however, but sexual predators, who carry the boy off to a dark basement, where he endures four days of hell before escaping...
...and, above all, the nature of male violence...
...Again and again Eastwood returns his camera to Perm's face as he battles mightily against weeping...
...Robbins affects a shambling, muted bewilderment, but his face becomes a mask of torment as the memory of his victimization washes over him, along with an intimation of his own capacity to do harm: "I can't trust my mind any more," he tells his rattled wife...
...Sean (Kevin Bacon), a state police detective whose marriage is on the skids...
...Is Mystic River a great film...
...That was then, this is now...
...Preoccupied with police procedural, the movie gets the job done, but it doesn't, well, blow you away...
...Sean's estranged wife, who calls repeatedly but never talks...
...God said you owed another marker, and he came to collect," muses Sean, dreadfully rehearsing what to say to Jimmy after the discovery of his daughter's body...
...Everyone is weak, Jimmy...
...Sean is assigned the case, and soon the list of suspects includes Dave, who was at the bar where Jimmy's daughter was last seen-and who, we know, came home that night covered in blood, offering his wife a not entirely convincing story of having beaten up, and possibly killed, a man who tried to mug him...
...Eastwood adapted his twenty-third film as director (and one of the very few in which he does not himself appear) from Dennis Lehane's novel of the same name, a piece of high-gloss crime fiction with serious literary ambitions...
...The end of the film contains a big mistake, with Jimmy exchanging his shopkeeper's garb for black leather, and Laura Linney, who as Jimmy's wife has been given short shrift, bursting forth in an unconvincing explosion of Lady Macbeth-like nihilism...
...There's a straightforwardness, a prosaic quality, to Eastwood's storytelling...
...The boys have grown up: Jimmy (Sean Penn), who has remade himself into a responsible father and grocery store owner following an early career as a robber...
...But we never feel we're being pushed for mere exercise through the maze of plot...
...It left me thinking that while Eastwood made the movie good, Scorsese might have made it great.ve made it great...
...Both novel and film begin on a lazy summer day in 1976 amid the drab triple-deckers of South Boston, where three boys are messing around in their neighborhood...
...Aside from a few moments of moody chiaroscuro during Dave's dark ramblings-and an operatic moment in which the camera rises above Penn, restrained by a bevy of cops and howling in anguish at his daughter's body-the film is curiously unatmospheric...
...Mystic River rests on a web of crisscrossing suspicion, accusation, and revenge...
...1)7 Or as profound moral inquiry...
...We follow him through the sad business of mortality-draping a blue dress over his daughter's body at the undertakers, composing a death notice, choosing a gravestone-as grief and a gathering rage contend within him...
...The three are brought back together by yet another horrific act of violence, when Jimmy's nineteen-year-old daughter, Katie, following a night out barhopping with two girlfriends, is shot and beaten to death in the local park...
...As cheeky art-house stylization (Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill-Vol...
...Is Jimmy just a punk after all...
...the mute brother of Brendan, Katie's secret suitor...
...Leave it to Clint Eastwood to understand the Commonweal moviegoer and answer us with Mystic River, his somber study of life-and death-in Irish-Catholic Boston...
Vol. 130 • November 2003 • No. 19
