"Mystic River"

The three kids grow up and apart, without ever leaving the environs of the 'hood, at least not permanently: Sean (Kevin Bacon) is a cop who knows something of the world and yet feels rooted to the old neighborhood. But emotionally speaking, he's adrift; his pregnant wife has taken off with another man. Dave (Tim Robbins) is the kind of guy who takes a patchwork of jobs to support his wife, Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden), and kid, but who drifts through his life as if he were waiting to reclaim it instead of actually living it. And Jimmy (Sean Penn) is an ex-con who now runs a popular corner store and who seems to have settled into a kind of dual-sided respectability: He's an upstanding, law-abiding citizen, but one who wouldn't be above knocking your teeth out if you looked at him crossways.

Jimmy's 19-year-old daughter, Katie (Emmy Rossum), has been brutally murdered; Sean is one of the investigators assigned to solve the crime. (His partner is played by Laurence Fishburne.) Dave, whose traumatic childhood experience has marked him permanently as an alien in the community (he's a victim twice over, and the second time there's no possible escape), becomes entangled in the case: He was one of the last people to see Katie alive, and he horrifies and frightens Celeste by showing up at home late that night with a knife slash across his stomach and his clothes soaked with blood.

There's rough poetry in the way Eastwood unravels the story and the network of connections between the three men: His screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, has captured the rhythm and lilt of South Boston speech in every line. (If you've read Lehane's book, you'll notice that much of the picture's dialogue jumps to life on screen word-for-word.) Cinematographer Tom Stern gives the movie a sheen of friendly but dispirited menace, showing us tidy yet cheerless neighborhood streets in which the houses have been kept up more out of duty than of genuine pride of place.

Even beyond Eastwood's admirable, note-perfect choices, there's something about "Mystic River" that shocked me: I don't think I expected to see so much empathy in a Clint Eastwood movie. Empathy is often viewed as a largely female trait, probably because it's simply convenient, rather than accurate, to think of it that way. But in "Mystic River," the women aren't used as vessels of compassion. In some ways, they're more ruthless than the men.

Laura Linney plays Annabeth, Jimmy's second wife and the mother of two of his three daughters (his first wife died while he was still in prison, after having given birth to Katie). Annabeth's pretty, heart-shaped face makes a convenient disguise for her Lady Macbeth-like resolve; Jimmy has plenty of backbone, but she's standing by with extra, just in case. Dave's wife, Celeste (played in a beautifully calibrated performance by Harden), is a dutiful wife and mother who nonetheless seems to have given up on attempting to make Dave happy, let alone understanding him. Without ever coming out and saying as much, she lets us know that she really would have preferred one of the other neighborhood husbands: capable, conventional, shallow and untortured, someone who would be a good mate and father and not make many waves.

Eastwood knows more about his male characters than even their wives do. He has a reputation, carefully cultivated over many years, as an exceedingly manly actor and director who understands men and understands 'em real good, damn it. And it's true that he's well acquainted with the nuts and bolts and lugs of machismo -- in other words, he's sympathetic to notions of manly duty and honor, an A-plus student of the "man's gotta do what a man's gotta do" school of emotional efficiency.

But Eastwood's view of manhood has always seemed cartoonishly flat compared with those of other directors who've built careers obsessing about the overlapping layers of masculinity, machismo and honor -- Sam Peckinpah and John Woo, to name just two great filmmakers who have done it well. "Mystic River" changes that. You could argue that it fits with Eastwood's grand vision to feel sympathy for a guy who was abused as a kid -- ordinarily, in Eastwood's view, the innocent underdog should be protected. That's what heroes do: They take care of the weak. The trouble is that that's simply another way of patronizing them.

But Eastwood takes a more subtle tack in "Mystic River." For one thing, he cast Robbins in the role, and Robbins is a tall guy who certainly looks like he can take care of himself. Robbins uses every inch of that height in his performance: His walk is stooped, not as if he's been beaten down, but as if he believes that by curving his body inward, he can protect his tortured thoughts until he can sort them out and dispatch them once and for all. The movie's attitude toward Dave is very clear. When Eastwood casts his male gaze on Dave, he doesn't see a feminized object ripe for his benevolent, masculine pity. Instead he slips us right into Dave's skin, and silently asks the question, with all the outrage it demands: What must it be like to be a man, in a community like this one, when a sexual crime that's been committed against you counts against you?

Next Page: A man's movie in the best sense of the term, anchored by a trio of great middle-aged actors

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