Movie Review - Cry me a river
River returns to Eastwood's view of violence, revenge
In a scenario dripping with True Detective creepiness, 10-year-old Dave gets into a stranger's car while his friends Jimmy and Sean look on.
The subsequent abduction and rape provide the narrative germ in Clint Eastwood's cancerous police thriller Mystic River, adapted by Brian Helgeland from a novel by Dennis Lehane.
When Dave returns to the community, the neighbors mutter about "damaged goods" and a sense permeates Mystic River that Eastwood shares their view. Like Deliverance's depiction of the violated Ned Beatty, Mystic River insinuates that rape destroys the masculinity of the victim and endangers that of the community. Eastwood's film has been celebrated for its sustained treatment of male grief, but more than that, it peers into the terminally bizarre, pulpy fixations of its director, who seems perpetually anxious to tell us what constitutes manhood.
Mystic River returns to the three friends decades later when they are reunited by another crime: the brutal murder of Jimmy's 19-year-old daughter. Sean (Kevin Bacon) is a homicide detective investigating the murder. Dave (Tim Robbins) is the broken man foreshadowed by the opening set-up. And Jimmy (Sean Penn), a rehabilitated jailbird, now runs a neighborhood grocery.
All three men are haunted by their childhood brush with evil. Jimmy, especially, has his antennae tuned to the frequencies that underpin normalcy with ugliness — he trusts no one, and his daughter's murder only confirms his nihilism.
Unwilling to trust institutions to find his daughter's killer, Jimmy instead employs a pair of human bulldogs, the Savage Brothers, who look like vengeance's brutal angels, but who succeed only in sinking the conflict to a deeper and more troubling arena.
Some critics have called Mystic River's ending Eastwood's reconsideration of the "problem" of violence. But Mystic River does not re-evaluate Eastwood's essential belief in the cathartic and justified masculine response of violence. In fact, the film establishes the violence as necessary to restore order and purge weakness and bad memories from the community. The police investigation that drives the film is in reality a distraction from the darker urges, which replace male anxiety about vulnerability with certainty.
Though heralded as nothing short of a masterpiece, the film is often an entirely conventional whodunit. Mystic River's most compelling aspect is how it continues the director's absolutely fascinating auteurist obsessions with mythic, Shakespearean values of revenge and the cruel whims of fate played out against Eastwood's favored cynical, working-class milieu. His world is as Old School as a Western, populated by salt-of-the-earth blue collars who may get no break in real life, but command center stage. Eastwood panders to critics and audiences' nostalgia for a lost world: an American value system of stoic integrity and an ancient code where no crime is left unavenged.
Though the outcome of Jimmy's vengeance proves disastrously wrong, his bruised but assertive masculinity commands our devotion. In a long line of Eastwood's macho punishers, Jimmy is a flawed but undeniably charismatic hero made more interesting in Sean Penn's hands. Penn is clearly an actor far more capable of registering a kind of despair unattainable by Eastwood's own pitilessly wooden action heroes.
Eastwood remains a defiant cowboy, enchanted with the righteousness of revenge and the law of the fist. His characters may do wrong — dead wrong. But as Jimmy's wife Annabeth (Laura Linney) assures her Christ-like husband at the film's conclusion, "you are a king." Masculinity may be tested, and it may be bruised, but in Eastwood's worldview, it is a force of nature that cannot be reduced to logic or reason, but simply is.
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