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Mystic River

Effect Eastwood shows a slow, sure hand in tale of revenge

By Jan Stuart | STAFF WRITER

October 3, 2003

(R). Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon pull out the stops as three former childhood buddies reunited in a tangle of suspicion and grief when one of their family members is murdered. Clint Eastwood's leisurely thriller is thick with atmosphere and manipulation. 2:17 (violence, language). Sold out premiere tonight, Lincoln Center. Opens wide Wednesday.

Clint Eastwood, director, has stubbed his toe on more than one occasion. But when he nails a genre, his films exude the authority and completeness of an apotheosis, an ultimate statement. "Unforgiven" wasn't just a horse opera. Rather, it seemed like The Last Western. "The Bridges of Madison County" was more than a soap opera. It felt somehow like The Last Romantic Drama.

With "Mystic River," one senses the "Dirty Harry" veteran aspiring toward The Last Existential Police Thriller. Emulating the page- turner momentum of Dennis Lehane's popular novel, it doesn't merely unfold. It engulfs us utterly in a shifting community (South Boston's yuppifying working-class neighborhoods) and a predominating sense of sadness.

Written with an acute ear for local color and character nuance by "A Knight's Tale" director Brian Helgeland, "Mystic River" tells the melancholy tale of three childhood buddies, Dave, Jimmy and Sean, who have gone separate ways but are chained together by a dark incident from their youth, when Dave was abducted and held captive by two pederasts. (In a none-too- subtle gesture, Eastwood literally shoves a reference to the Catholic Church's recent child- abuse scandal in our faces.)

Dave has grown into a wisp of a man (Tim Robbins, stooped and deflated, like a tire that has had most of the air let out), married to a cipher of a woman who won't threaten his fragility (Marcia Gay Harden). Despite his meekness, Dave becomes a prime suspect when the eldest daughter of Jimmy (Sean Penn) is brutally murdered.

A reformed toughie with a robbery rap and a second wife of Lady Macbeth-ian devotion (Laura Linney), the grief-stricken Jimmy deploys two goons (aptly named the Savage Brothers) to help him track down his daughter's killer. Jimmy's vigilante efforts compete with the police investigation led by his old friend Sean (Kevin Bacon, in one of his smartest performances to date) and Sean's partner (Laurence Fishburne).

One could spend a week sorting out the accumulation of ironies and moral quandaries that lead to the double punch of "Mystic River's" smashing final act. Eastwood has never been a hurried director, and he gives us time to wallow in each of the characters' angst. If anything, he leans toward the overemphatic. There's a lot of Acting going on in this picture: We get a bit too much of Penn's terrible grief, Harden's silent anguish, Robbins' suspicious fumbling and mumbling.

What you end up admiring about the film is its literacy, its authenticity (rarely does a commercial picture read an American city as correctly as this one reads Boston) and its refusal to let us down easily. As bestseller adaptations go, "Mystic River" goes a good way toward redeeming the blunder that was Eastwood's "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil."