Clint Eastwood’s crime drama is patient, painful and worth the effort, especially for Tim Robbins and Marcia Gay Harden. The score can be overbearing, but the actors make the damage done by violence feel personal.
Mystic River is a powerful crime drama with a tendency to keep explaining after the actors have already convinced us. Clint Eastwood directs Brian Helgeland’s adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s novel as a story about three boyhood friends whose adult lives remain marked by a childhood crime. There is a police investigation, but Eastwood keeps returning to the people around it and the community they inhabit. He spends much of the film attending to their painful, unfinished relationships.
Sean Penn’s Jimmy Markum supplies much of the film’s force, and occasionally more than a scene can comfortably contain. Penn makes grief physically exhausting to watch; there are moments when the effort becomes too visible. Tim Robbins, as Dave Boyle, is harder to read and more troubling to sit with. We found Robbins’s close-ups distressing; the fear in an adult face makes the lasting harm of the childhood crime horribly plain. Eastwood gives that face time, rather than hurrying towards the next piece of information.
Marcia Gay Harden is equally affecting as Celeste Boyle. Harden makes fear seem capable of changing what a person hears, and her attention to the other actors is as affecting as anything she says. Kevin Bacon’s Sean Devine and Laurence Fishburne’s Whitey Powers help keep the performances from settling into a single mournful tone. Bacon is restrained, Fishburne firmer, and both provide welcome resistance to the temptation to make every exchange sound momentous. Bacon in particular benefits from being allowed to underplay.
Tom Stern’s close-ups and Joel Cox’s unhurried editing give the performances room to develop. A face can stay before us long enough for its first, apparently obvious expression to become uncertain. That patience is especially useful with Robbins, whose discomfort would lose much of its force if the film kept cutting away. Henry Bumstead’s production design also helps establish a Boston neighbourhood with a life beyond the investigation. The place feels settled and familiar, which makes the suspicion circulating through it harder to dismiss as a passing disturbance.
Eastwood’s music is less assured. Its heavy theme bears down on scenes whose distress is already plain, and we sometimes wanted the score to leave the actors alone. At 138 minutes, the film also has stretches where Cox’s patient pace becomes a little too patient. Those passages do not undo the care elsewhere, but they make the solemnity harder to bear. One speech in Helgeland’s screenplay is too explicit about what the drama has already shown.
As a thriller, it is unusually willing to let the investigation share the screen with painful relationships. The long acquaintance between these men makes familiar crime-story questions about trust and suspicion feel personal. Eastwood takes their suffering seriously without making every response to it seem justified. That matters in a film about vengeance, where sympathy for somebody in pain can so easily become permission for whatever they do next. Save it for an evening when there is no need to be cheered up.
