It's hard for me to believe now just how much I used to like Mystic River. I loved it. I thought the acting was superb, one or two quibbles aside, and appreciated it as a powerful piece of dramatic work. Now? Don't get me wrong, it's not a film I will ever dismiss as being awful, but the power of it has greatly diminished in the past couple of decades since it was first released. And at least one performance feels like an actor acting his actorliest to ensure all viewers are aware of, and recognise, his ACTING.
The story starts in the past, with with three young boys playing on a sidewalk. They're caught by a man while writing their names in cement, with one of the boys hauled off to be reprimanded. Apparently. It soon becomes clear that this boy has been captured by predators, and is seriously traumatised when he is eventually found days later. In the present those three boys have grown up to be a gangster (Jimmy Markum, played by Sean Penn), a cop (Sean Devine, played by Kevin Bacon), and a man still haunted by that day he was taken into that car (Dave Boyle, played by Tim Robbins). The men are reunited by the murder of Jimmy's teen daughter (played by Emmy Rossum), an inciting incident that forces them all to look back over their past lives and to consider their different paths.
Based on the novel by Dennis Lehane, there's a decent screenplay here by Brian Helgeland, particularly when it comes to exploring the personality of Dave, a man who still can't quite process what he was put through as a young boy. There's also a definite "sins of the father" message playing out, and that works well as the various strands tie together in the third act. It's just a shame that the cast isn't as strong as it could be, and it's a shame that director Clint Eastwood didn't consider trimming the 138-minute runtime to omit a coda that I've always viewed as very strange and out of sync with the rest of the film.
A lot of praise went to Penn for his performance, but I'd argue that he's the weakest of the leads. Whether grimacing in pain and anger or trying to give his best bit of DeNiro-esque quiet menace, Penn's performance is based completely on getting people to watch him perform. It's a big mis-step, and almost unbalances the whole film. Bacon does a bit better, helped by the fact that he is given more of a variety of emotions to work with, and also ably supported in many scenes by an ever-dependable Laurence Fishburne. It's Robbins who deserves the real credit though. Having somehow managed to fit his 6'5" frame into a wide variety of characters throughout his film career, this may be his best work yet when it comes to making himself seem small and vulnerable. He's not entirely comfortable with the accent that his character has, but he's always convincing as a man seeing the world through some thin funereal shroud that has been wrapped around him since his childhood. Marcia Gay Harden and Laura Linney are a bit wasted, although the former has a couple of good moments in the first half of the film, and Tom Guiry, Spencer Treat Clark, and Andrew Mackin do well as three young men who become persons of interest in the ongoing investigation.
Maybe this will be remade in a couple of decades, and maybe the cast will work better. Eastwood was clearly drawn to the material, and there's an undeniable power to a couple of key sequences, but I think he allowed himself to be hoodwinked by someone who wasn't really right for one of the key roles. In fact, ironically enough, Penn may have been a better choice to step behind the camera on this one.
I would never call this a complete washout, but some of the sins needing cleaned in Mystic River aren't just ones belonging to the characters onscreen. Some of them belong to the performances, and the decisions guiding those performances. The good still outweighs the bad though, and I still recommend this to people who have never seen it before.
7/10
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