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MYSTIC RIVER
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Three boyhood friends from Chelsea/ East Boston, all traumatized by the same incident, grow up in the shadow of a rusting bridge to become a crook, a cop, and a wreck, growing their separate ways until a brutal neighborhood murder brings them back together through their past psychic roots ….
In plot and story action, the movie MYSTIC RIVER (from the Dennis Lehane novel) is formulaic and predictable. Goaded by his savvy partner Whitey (Laurence Fishburne, APOCALYPSE NOW, 1979; Morpheus has been hitting the Krispy Kremes), cop Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon, ANIMAL HOUSE, 1978) reluctantly comes to suspect buddy Dave Boyle (Tim Robbins, TOP GUN, 1986) of killing Katie, daughter of tough-guy crook Jimmy Markum (Sean Penn, FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH, 1982) even as Jimmy does too. We've seen all this before.
What lifts MYSTIC RIVER out of cliché is its ensemble performances, headlined by Sean Penn's gripping Oscar-worthy performance (he may be a lout, but he sure can act) as Jimmy. Penn is ably supported by Bacon's flinty clipped cop, Fishburne's jaundiced sidekick, and the two wring-and-weep women's roles (as Dave's fearful wife Celeste, Marcia Gay Harden's (POLLOCK) range is bounded by the limits of lip tremolo, and Laura Linney's (YOU CAN COUNT ON ME) Annabeth too plain to be believed). But busted slumped Dave, the central broken hub around which all the plot's clockwork ticks, is a neon-flashing breakdown waiting to happen: one simply cannot visualize him playing star high school shortstop, wooing a girl, fathering a child, even holding a job (we never learn what it might be). He is Suspect-In-Waiting.
This is no fault of his acting – Robbins is credible, adult, in his character, one of his best performances ever – but of screenplay and of staging. Unlike UNFORGIVEN, where director Eastwood (A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, 1964) trusted his audience to read the backstory, here he insists on staging the boyhood trauma as a frame/flashback, complete with symbolic writing in wet cement (Dave's name is aborted), portentous background music (by Clint Eastwood), and whirling-sky camera angles.
Asked for a foolproof way to carve an elephant, the apocryphal sculptor replied, Start with a block of marble and chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant. To turn a novel into a movie (which can hold about one tenth the plot detail/ character complexity), chip away everything inessential. With its first ten minutes cut and the trauma shadow-staged, everything about MYSTIC RIVER would have been better: the story mysterious in two time lines, the breakdowns and truths not telegraphed, the tragedy less foreshadowed, the repeated and echoed motifs (for instance, mute absent loved ones) not so visibly allegorical.
Arrive ten minutes late and leave five minutes early, and MYSTIC RIVER would be nearly flawless. And with DVD …