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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Clint Eastwood brings Dennis Lehane's Boston revenge saga to the screen as a mournful, masculine noir that's also the strongest film of his long career.
Oct 8, 2003 | With "Mystic River" Clint Eastwood has invented a new movie subgenre: neighborhood noir. In both the movie and the Dennis Lehane novel on which it is faithfully based, neighborhoods aren't comforting places; they're menacing ones, where the jovial, longtime buddy you pass on the street knows not just all your secrets but all your weaknesses as well. The type of siding that covers your house betrays your class and your educational background, not that those matter much anyway.
In the working-class Boston neighborhoods of "Mystic River," the most feral and the most ruthless creatures become the natural kings, and anyone who's too sensitive or too damaged needs to be sacrificed for the good of the tribe. Yet even if Eastwood's (and Lehane's) view sounds steeped in cynicism, it's really a kind of raw mournfulness. "Mystic River" is hard-boiled beyond toughness: It's so tender the skin falls away from the bone. It's Eastwood's most soulful, and most organic, movie.
Over the years Eastwood has been revered as a director for reasons that probably have more to do with iconography than with actual talent: As an actor, he's always been rugged and laconic, a product of the wised-up, weathered-barn school of masculinity -- a handsomer version of the American Gothic guy, with a handgun instead of a pitchfork. Similarly, the movies he's directed are quintessentially American, sturdy and straight-shooting, maybe, but often lacking grace and an innate sense of rhythm: To draw an analogy from one of the American art forms Eastwood loves best, they're like jazz ruled by the metronome and not by the heart.
Sometimes there has to be a kind of mad messiness to great art, and Eastwood is all about neatness and control. His movies, more often than not, feel like missed opportunities. The 1989 "Bird," about an American outsider who was also one of our greatest artists, and the 1995 "The Bridges of Madison County," about a tender extramarital affair, were both rich with possibilities for exploring the way the American sensibility supposedly encourages passionate exploration, only to put a lid on it when things get too hot.
"Mystic River"
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Starring Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon, Tim Robbins, Marcia Gay Harden, Laura Linney
Yet both movies feel cool and detached and rigidly respectable, not to mention just plain clunky: They strive to be great movies, but they're really just movies erected as symbols of greatness. Eastwood's 1993 "Unforgiven," with its elegiac brutality, cuts closer to the bone than probably any other Eastwood picture, and, unlike most of them, draws real blood instead of the squib kind. Mostly, though, Eastwood seems at his best (and most relaxed) in throwaway entertainments like the 2000 "Space Cowboys," movies made for fun and not for the pantheon.
"Mystic River" isn't a complete departure from Eastwood's usual mode of filmmaking, but it is a refinement of it. The scenes are filmed and connected with Eastwood's usual careful deliberateness. Certain shots and motifs from early in the film (a cross; the vision of a boy being whisked away in the back seat of a car) are echoed later. They're good images, but there's also something a little textbookish about them. Even though we feel like good film students when we seize upon them, they momentarily jolt us out of the movie's inner world, pulling us above the surface of its dreamy, dusky sadness.
That may seem overly picky, but it's worth mentioning because "Mystic River" is almost instantly absorbing -- it doesn't so much hook you in as envelop you in a treacherous, vaporous embrace. The picture moves forward with assurance and ease; it's as if Eastwood's by-the-book confidence has settled into something like a steady, human pulse.
The movie is set in a fictitious blue-collar nook of Boston called East Buckingham, but it's made-up in name only. As Eastwood shows it to us -- and as Lehane, a Boston native himself, described it so perfectly in his book -- it's a dead ringer for specific areas of the city, like South Boston and Charlestown, marked by clannishness, familial bonhomie and sharp distrust of just about anyone who's not white and of Irish descent. "Mystic River" opens in the mid-'70s. We meet three boys who are friends not because they like each other, exactly, but because geography and circumstance have thrown them together.
They're playing in the street one afternoon, scratching their names into a panel of fresh cement with a stick, when a car pulls up and out steps a thuggish fellow pretending to be a cop. He sizes up the boys in an instant -- their names are Sean, Jimmy and Dave -- and decides that of the three of them, the trusting, far-from-street-tough Dave is his easiest mark. The guy orders Dave into the car, where another "cop" waits. They say, with the kind of tough-guy surliness that would be perfectly believable cop behavior to a 10-year-old, that they're going to drop Dave off at home to tell his mother that he's been defacing public property.
But what really happens -- as we intuit quickly, with sinking hearts -- is that the men abduct Dave and sexually abuse him for several days. He manages to escape and return home, where he's welcomed back with supposedly open arms. But he is, as one of the other boys' fathers notes grimly, "damaged goods."
