‘Mystic River’: compelling vigilantism drama

How much can a single isolated event change the lives of three young friends? Combining the best elements of a crime drama and a psychological genre film, Mystic River explores this notion of determinism.

Jimmy Markum (Sean Penn), Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon) and Dave Boyle (Tim Robbins) grew up together in a tightly knit Irish-American working class enclave in South Boston. One day, their puerile hjinks are interrupted when a man, purporting to be a police detective, abducts young Dave. The 11-year-old Dave is viciously tortured and sodomized by the ersatz cop and his sidekick.

Somehow, things are never the same between the boys and their lives veer off in different directions. Sean becomes a homicide detective with the Massachusetts State Police. After doing time for burglary, Jimmy has seemingly reformed and operates a neighborhood market. Dave, who never quite recovers from having been sexually abused, holds a series of marginal jobs.
As adults, the three former chums rarely see one another. Then one day, the decades of detachment comes to an end. Sean is assigned to investigate the brutal killing of Jimmy’s daughter. Dave is a prime suspect in the murder. The three men must confront the legacy of the long-ago incident that they are all desperately trying to forget.

Once again, director Clint Eastwood (multi-Oscar-winning Unforgiven) demonstrates that his notoriously efficient shooting schedule can be maintained without compromising the quality of the end product. He elicits fine performances from his stellar cast. In particular, Sean Penn should be singled out for another bravura performance as a man battling, sometimes unsuccessfully, to contain his rage and need for revenge. While focusing primarily on the three leads, Eastwood gives his supporting actors, who include Lawrence Fishburne as Sean’s partner, Whitey Powers; Laura Linney as Jimmy’s wife, Annabeth; and Marcia Gay Harden as Dave’s wife, Celeste, an opportunity to shine.

The screenplay by Brian Helgeland does a fine job of adapting Dennis Lehane’s novel. As a result, Mystic River is full of the unexpected plot twists, foreshadowing and moral ambiguity, which are found in the source text. Unfortunately, Mystic River is marred by two gratuitous scenes, which are appended to the natural endpoint for the film. This compromises the dramatic structure of the film and gratuitously introduces some iconographically troubling notions.

Despite an ending that dissipates the film’s dramatic intensity, Mystic River delivers a compelling treatise on vigilantism.

***R (for language and violence) 137 minutes