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Jimmy’s a local gangster and ex-con, and still hangs around with a couple of leather-jacketed, 40something hooligans, ridiculously named the Savage brothers (Adam Nelson and Robert Wahlberg). They’ve had little contact with one another over the years, but now they’re slammed together, forced to contend - at long last - with their separate loads of guilt, pain, and ongoing horror.Įach has suffered or delivered his own hurt before this moment. Worse, the movie’s elaborate orchestration of woe has the third boy, Sean (Kevin Bacon) on the case as lead detective. That this family happens to be that of Jimmy (Sean Penn), one of those two boys who watched Dave disappear that fateful day so long ago, is of course no coincidence. The terrible notion that her husband’s own “vampires” have at last emerged after so many years leads Celeste to spend a lot of time over at the dead girl’s house, helping the family with the wake and ensuing daily details. It also confirms her niggling suspicion that Dave has something to do with the recent murder of 19-year-old Katie (Emmy Rossum), as he came home that same night with blood on his hands and a knife wound, which he attributed at the time to a mugger fought off in a parking lot. This ramble understandably alarms his already edgy wife, Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden), who appears to have precious little understanding of the basic facts of his abduction (and this couple has a child together - have they never discussed this crucial subject before?). But maybe there’s something beautiful about it, like someday they wake up and forget what it’s like to be human.” Instead, it piles on the outrages, emphasizes the broader cultural chaos they reflect, and grants its able performers big fat scenes where their characters’ grief and damage are telegraphed in meaningful shadows and dialogue: “Vampires,” pronounces Dave one night. To its credit, and not unlike Eastwood’s oddest and riskiest film to date,Ī Perfect World, Mystic River doesn’t allow vengeance or catharsis for this outrage. In case this emblem doesn’t underline the point for you, it’s also clear that Dave is a little uncertain in his gait, shuffly and mumbly with his child, outward signs that the effects of his ordeal remain with Dave, that he is, as yet, also undone.Īdapted from Dennis Lehane’s novel by Brian Helgeland, Eastwood’s film uses Dave’s story - and its enduring resonances for his two boyhood friends - as a means to break down the losses of innocence and layers of reckoning that make up a mythic history. Walking home from a ballgame with his own young son, he happens on the sidewalk where his name remains undone. Years later, the film resumes, and poor, traumatized Dave is now a dad (played by Tim Robbins). The cops scour the area, to no avail, and then, miraculously, Dave escapes - the camera rushing with him through the trees, tipping up to show the blue sky, wisps of white clouds swirling. This is a terrible thing, of course: the child is locked away in a basement and molested for four days. The car pulls off, slowly, forebodingly, the camera watching Dave’s frightened face in the back window, then cutting abruptly, to take the boy’s point of view, pulling away from the two left behind. fearful and distrusting, Dave - the kid whose name remains ominously unfinished - obliges.
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Three 11-year-olds are writing their names in wet sidewalk cement when a car pulls up: the driver flashes a badge and commands one of the kids to get in.
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It’s the sort of neighborhood where everyone knows everyone’s business, but it’s the sort of community where stoic silence marks manhood. It travels along the surface of a dark, wide river to the working class streets of Boston, where guys sit on porches outside their apartments and talk baseball. The first take, accompanied by Eastwood’s own score (which becomes increasingly ponderous as it is overused), is long and deliberate. It knows it’s an important movie, and means to let you know it too. Sober and imposing, Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River spreads over the screen with a sense of purpose.