"Mystic River"

Eastwood's view of the other two characters is no less complex. Sean is the good soldier, the guy who follows the rules and does just as he's told. But as Bacon plays him (in the finest performance the actor has given in years), we can see the ways he's both aching to break out and desperately trying to fit in. He doesn't like being a lonely, unmarried guy, left alone with his own confusion; he wants a wife by his side. And yet there's something about him that doesn't quite fit, either with the other two characters or with this overly familiar neighborhood. Where Jimmy is driven to act by adrenaline rushes and not by reason, and Dave is too frozen to act, period, Sean reasons everything out before he makes a move.

Bacon plays Sean like the guy in the middle, the decent fellow with more good sense than anyone and yet the one who's most aware of his own shapelessness: If Dave is filled with unnameable hopelessness and Jimmy is filled with pure rage, Sean is filled with decency, and he knows how colorless and ineffectual it makes him. Bacon pulls off one of the hardest things for an actor to do: He shows us the drama inherent in being the regular guy.

And yet it's Penn's Jimmy that we feel the most for -- partly because Eastwood feels the most for him and partly because Penn inhabits him so viscerally. This is the most complicated type of love I've ever seen in an Eastwood movie. The character for whom you feel the most sympathy is also the one who has the most to answer for, the one who, by every prescribed moral code, should draw out our disapproval and disgust. We recoil from him, and we also recognize how safe and warm we'd feel if we were under his protection.

Jimmy's mouth is permanently turned down into a clown's scowl, and that's even before his daughter is killed. But his love for her, a love that's simultaneously easy and firm, is never in doubt. We see them together in just one scene, early in the movie, and we feel the affable devotion between them -- in this relationship, she's the tiger, youthful and ready to spring at life, and he's the pussycat, a crotchety tom whose noisy purring mechanism betrays his capacity for love and pleasure.

That one small scene sets us up for everything else Penn does in the movie. In the first few hours after his daughter goes missing, he doesn't worry about her much; but when he realizes that Katie's car has been found, empty and bloodied, and that police are searching for a body in a nearby park, he crashes the crime scene, attempting to push his way through a scrum of blue-clad cops -- their clumsy attempt at orderliness is like an affront to his howling, wordless grief.

As Penn plays him, Jimmy looks like a pretty hard guy -- his eyes are small and lost, confused about how they should be relating to the rest of his face, let alone the world -- but we also see how his grief makes him softer. Dave and Jimmy haven't been friends for years, but when Dave shows up at Jimmy's house after the body is discovered, as part of the wave of friends who descend on the family as a show of support, they suddenly find themselves alone together on the back porch. Jimmy reaches out to Dave, without even knowing he's reaching out; his mere acknowledgment of Dave is an act of desperation and kindness, since Dave seems to drift through life in the neighborhood like a ghost, a specter whose presence the locals tolerate but pretend not to notice. Jimmy wouldn't be the sort of guy to say, "Thanks for being here." Instead he compliments Dave by mentioning Dave's wife, who has come to the house to help out: "That Celeste, she's a godsend, thank her for me, will you?" Penn says the words casually, as if they were just chitchat, but their meaning is clear: Our only real hope of communicating man-to-man is to go through our women.

Later, we see that Jimmy's grief hasn't softened him at all. Instead, he has a way of turning sorrow into extra muscle -- it makes him stronger and more lethal, as well as more unreasonable, than he ever was before. And yet we can't turn away from Jimmy: When he asks the funeral director if he can see his daughter, he's led to a basement, where he looks down on her body. He's brought a dress for her to wear, and he lays it on top of her sheet-covered body as if she were a paper doll. His tenderness becomes inextricable from his monstrousness. This is one of Penn's most complex performances, and it may be his greatest.

"Mystic River" is a man's movie, and that's not a slam: For one thing, it's anchored by a tripod of great male roles, ones that give the actors who fill them something to work with. Moviegoers and critics often assert, and not incorrectly, that there aren't many good roles for actresses of middle age and above. But it's not as if opportunities to do Chekhov or Shakespeare or O'Neill are lurking around every corner for middle-aged men, either. Watching the three leads in "Mystic River," you realize that Eastwood has done something smart and generous just by handing them these meaty roles.

Its potent masculinity aside, though, "Mystic River" may be Eastwood's most tender movie. When Sean and Whitey (Fishburne) discover Katie's body, the crime scene isn't shown to us with clinical coldness, the way we see it on most TV cop shows. Eastwood wrote the movie's score, and the music he uses in this scene is mournful but restrained -- he's smart enough to keep it from competing with the images, something more seasoned composers have yet to learn (and something plenty of directors never learn). The camera pulls back to show us the lifeless body in its new setting, a tangle of grass and leaves ringed by stones. In just a few short hours, it has become part of the landscape, more at home with the cool stillness of greenery and twigs than with the warmth of human beings.

If that's not empathy, what is? "Mystic River" isn't a perfect movie; there are places where Eastwood's slavish devotion to craftsmanship calls attention to itself, jostling us out of the pure feeling of the story. But we can always find our way back in, which testifies to the movie's effectiveness. This is filmmaking with a strong sense of place and of people: "Mystic River" suggests that where we come from determines, in a notion of fate derived straight out of Greek tragedy by way of film noir, what kind of people we're going to be. But beyond that, the neighborhood's promise of consistency and security means nothing. In noir neighborhoods, as well as the old tragic Greek ones, there's heartache around every corner, for the strong as well as the weak.

• View blog reactions