Mystic River (2003)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
The lives of three men who were childhood friends are shattered when one of them suffers a family tragedy.
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14 films that influenced Mystic River
What critics say influenced Mystic River
The success of Mystic River as melodrama and art is precisely what I mistrust about it, because that success comes with dubious baggage in tow -- baggage that's less obviously dubious than the Nazi propaganda served by Leni Riefenstahl's artistry in Triumph of the Will but still consequential.
The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix lushly reproduces Eastwood's music (strangely reminiscent of Angelo Badalamenti's Wild at Heart compositions), really the only sound element to substantially occupy the rear channels.
To its credit, and not unlike Eastwood's oddest and riskiest film to date, A Perfect World, Mystic River doesn't allow vengeance or catharsis for this outrage.
Not only is the film the director’s best work since his undervalued A Perfect World, it’s also one of the most spiritually profound works to come out of the Hollywood studio system in quite some time.
The picture is a rhyme of Eastwood's A Perfect World , complete with spiralling shots of the sky through branches--the evocation of a Naturalism at war with any illusion of moral spirituality or humanism, with its heroes criminals shaded equally by the instinct to violence and the instinct to nurture.
The basic themes of "Mystic River" are ones that Eastwood has explored before in films like "Unforgiven" and "A Perfect World" but this time around, he brings no new thoughts or insights to the table.
But then look at a film like A Perfect World where Eastwood allowed Kevin Costner's fatherly instincts to guide a sweetly dark film about losing innocence in pre-Kennedy assassination Texas.
At one point Dave sits and watches Carpenter's Vampires on TV and compares his life (unfavorably) to one of the bloodsucker's, the bottle of an untouched beer poking up from between his knees.
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What's more, "Mystic River" won an Oscar for costar Tim Robbins as well, for Best Supporting Actor, a performance that could well have been nominated in the Best Actor category if it weren't for the "All About Eve" syndrome, where in 1950 Anne Baxter and Bette Davis cancelled each other out for the same movie.
Clint Eastwood has always been fascinated by themes of justice, revenge and fate, as explored so adroitly in the Oscar-winning "Unforgiven."
Time and again, a rabid press compares the movie to Clint Eastwood's seminal directorial achievement, Unforgiven.
Unforgiven, the film in which Eastwood himself makes the above-cited speech, was rightfully honored with several Oscars for its superb treatment of this inexhaustible theme.
Directed by the legendary Clint Eastwood, the man behind such gems as "Unforgiven" and "Bird," comes "Mystic River," a potboiler of a thriller: Three boys' lives become forever altered when one of them is abducted and molested and then once again, twenty five years later, when one of their children is brutally murdered.
In Clint Eastwood's Oscar-winning "Unforgiven," a young gunfighter justifies a revenge killing by telling his veteran partner, "I guess they had it comin.'"
Clint Eastwood directed 17 movies before they finally gave him the Oscar for Unforgiven.
Mystic River, which Eastwood directed from Brian Helgeland's adaptation of the Dennis Lehane novel, is perhaps the greatest, most affecting articulation of the theme Eastwood has been exploring since 1990's White Hunter Black Heart: how violence—real violence, not movie violence—perpetrated and experienced, can erode and/or obliterate the human soul.
Since his directorial debut in 1971 with Play Misty for Me , Clint Eastwood has managed to convince a lot of otherwise discerning people that his plodding, juiceless movies—which manage to be simultaneously laid-back and heavy-handed—are the work of a daring auteur with a strong moral vision.
From the victim of the sexual revolution in "Play Misty for Me" to the superannuated gunfighters and obsolete values of "Unforgiven," his movies always seem to be about Men with a capital M. With "Mystic River," Eastwood considers, not for the first time, the cardinal values of loyalty and guilt and shame and strength as they play out against the male tribal culture of violence and emotional repression; the results are explosive, heartbreaking, tragic on a Shakespearean scale.
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Directed by the legendary Clint Eastwood, the man behind such gems as "Unforgiven" and "Bird," comes "Mystic River," a potboiler of a thriller: Three boys' lives become forever altered when one of them is abducted and molested and then once again, twenty five years later, when one of their children is brutally murdered.
Eastwood clarifies his running thesis (White Hunter, Black Heart, Unforgiven , Bird) that man's only aspiration is to mythologize his basest instincts (to protect the women, to dominate the men)--base instincts that refuse to be honourable in any civilized context.
In films as varied as Tightrope, Bird and Unforgiven he simultaneously explores the unholy lure of violence while exposing its nauseating underbelly.
Although he can sometimes be an incredibly sloppy filmmaker when he is simply going through the motions (as duds like "The Rookie" and "Blood Work" demonstrate), he is even worse when he sets out to make Art; when that happens, the results-films such as "Bird" and the inexplicable "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"- are dull, dark (literally and figuratively) exercises that plod along endlessly with all the verve of an especially draggy sermon.
The 1989 "Bird," about an American outsider who was also one of our greatest artists, and the 1995 "The Bridges of Madison County," about a tender extramarital affair, were both rich with possibilities for exploring the way the American sensibility supposedly encourages passionate exploration, only to put a lid on it when things get too hot.
"Breezy" flopped with critics and at the box office, and so did "Bird" (1988) and "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" (1996).
(By comparison, the John Sayles film "Lone Star" also used a murder as a vehicle to explore buried secrets of the past, and the ending emphatically delivered on all of the intrigue built up throughout the film.