Ray Pride

You can't step in the same river twice, especially if it's washed away your innocence.

Clint Eastwood's mournful chamber tragedy, "Mystic River," adapted by Brian Helgeland from a novel by Dennis Lehane, is that rare American movie steeped in grief, without resorting to some sort of comic relief. Disloyalty, pedophilia, fratricide: all the stuff that gets asses on seats on a Saturday night.

Three boys are playing street hockey in a working-class Boston neighborhood. They etch their names in wet cement. Two men claiming to be cops take one boy away. They molest the boy for three days before he escapes through the woods.

Thirty years pass. One of the three has grown up to be a homicide cop (Kevin Bacon), another a petty criminal (Sean Penn) who lords it over the old neighborhood entwined by the sludgy ribbon of the Mystic River. Tim Robbins, a giant of a man whose performance is all crumple and shuffle, is the man who grew out of the abused boy.

The clouds do not lift. The movie is overcast. Every life is lapped by daily distress. Penn's 19-year-old daughter is murdered. The fragile balance of these damaged lives is shattered. "Mystic River" is partly a police procedural. But also a character study of how time and regret and fear have been etched upon the faces of the once-innocent boys grown to broken men.

Does mastery require modesty? As many directors grow older, experience more of life and evolve their own notions of storytelling, the work grows more straightforward. At 73, making his twenty-fourth feature, Eastwood's no-nonsense, no-frills visual style is at its most refined. Perhaps it is not elegant, but it is streamlined. It's the kind of movie that age and experience should permit you to make. Eastwood has joked in interviews that the two sequels to "The Matrix" are his favorite movies of the year since the Warner Bros. brass were so caught up in its release than they didn't interfere with his small, anguished film that does not let its characters (or the audience) off the hook in the end. Kent Jones' has a lovely, if unlikely, description of Eastwood's style in the September Film Comment: "[He] has an old-fashioned sense of responsibility to his audience, giving his movies a nice overtone: at times, they have the air of a teenage boy who's being polite and attentive to the adults at a Sunday gathering before retreating to his room and burying himself in a book of poetry."

The poetry lies in his use of structuring space differently for each character. Robbins bears the weight of the world on his shoulders, and his most anguished scene finds him in almost total darkness, darker even than Eastwood's usual brown-on-black design. Bacon's cop (accompanied by an uncommonly restrained Lawrence Fishburne as his partner) is given the horizon line: a man who can cross boundaries within the city (the topography of which Eastwood has etched through canny use of helicopter and overhead shots). Penn: a center of fury in each composition he occupies. Eastwood tickles in closer at times, but seldom allows the characters to breathe in larger space. When Eastwood goes wide, there's spatial context, but once he's back in the midst of the characters, he traps them in those clean, unembellished frames. The simple, melancholy leitmotif of the score credited to Eastwood is more oomphatic than necessary, but it's easy to excuse.

"Mystic River" also holds one of the most remarkable line readings in memory, when Bacon realizes that the dead girl is his childhood friend's daughter: "Oh shit," he says, and Bacon demonstrates that acting is so much more than text and language. There's an entire life indicated there: Oh shit, indeed.

It's not European art, it's the distillate of so many kinds of experience, rather than say, the autistic fever dream of "Kill Bill," which is only a clangorous summary of all the shit our minds should purge from our consciousness as we swim through our daily message-inflicted multimedia lives. Eastwood is more contemplative, yet he weaves together a range of uniquely American movie-acting styles.

Penn is getting the yawnsome early Oscar buzz. His petty gangster is an animal baiting a wounded creature, sensing weakness, punishing it, exploiting it. His wrath is palpable, a bookend to the unsure desperation he portrays in Alejandro Gonzalez-Inarritu's equally impassioned "21 Grams" (opening in November). Robbins is remarkable as well, trying to scrunch his bear's frame down to the scale of his character's epic self-loathing. And Bacon does a tremendous job of indicating the man who cannot open himself up to emotions.

"Mystic River" is rarefied pulp. It's not literature. But it does get at so many hard truths in its quiet, persistent, unforgiving fashion. Revenge is a sour temptation. Eastwood knows this, and his movie displays its bitter fruit.

"Mystic River" is now playing.

(2003-10-08)

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