Mystic River - Hold the Pizza

my rating: Nathan's rating:

Mystic River should not be confused with Mystic Pizza, the fun small-town romantic comedy that featured young Julia Roberts 15 years ago. It is, in many ways, the exact opposite, with the only romance in the story quickly interrupted, and very little humor or even happy endings. The film is instead an urban character drama/mystery ruled by dysfunctional relationships between unhappy people, and a series of tragedies that end... in tragedy. And it's in Massachusetts, not Connecticut.

The story is about three boyhood friends whose lives were changed when one of them - essentially chosen at random from the three - was abducted by two Dirty Old Men posing as cops, then repeatedly raped before he escaped, four days later. The victim (Tim Robbins) became a psychological basket case, stumbling his way through life, though managing to find a wife and raise a reasonably well-adjusted son. Another of the boys (Kevin Bacon) became a police detective (a decision apparently unrelated to the childhood incident, the movie doesn't explain). The third (Sean Penn) drifts (again for reasons unexplained) in the opposite direction, into a life with a foot in a legitimate neighborhood business and the church, and another in the criminal underworld. As adults, the three have mostly lost touch, but all remain near the neightborhood where they'd lived as boys. A murder brings them back into each other's lives.

The three main actors and the supporting cast all do well, despite some Bostonian accents that ebb and flow. Keeping the accents minimal helps avoid unintentional comedy and keeps most of the dialog easily intelligible to non-New-Englanders, but that makes it more confusing when someone suddenly refers to a "cah" and it takes a split-second while you re-activate your dialect interpretter to figure out he's talking about a "car". But anyways, they're all believable in their roles.

The story has a recurring "not talking" motif, including Kevin Bacon's estranged wife, who keeps calling him but not saying anything, and the mute (but not deaf) brother of one of the suspects in the killing. It has to be symbolic, because the fact of their silence never plays a signficant role in the plot. Perhaps it's meant to tie in with a theme of the three friends no longer staying in contact, or the things that various characters don't tell each other, but it either went over my head or was insufficiently developed.

One message the film seems to be trying to convey (one of the characters suggests it, and nobody refutes the idea) is that all three boys were victims of the kidnapping. The thought that "it could have been me" was no doubt traumatic to them at the time, and clearly haunted the other two. While I don't disagree with this, it does seem to stretch the point a bit; Robbins' character was - of course - clearly traumatised more profoundly.

I was bothered, however, by the fatalistic attitude the film seemed to take about that trauma. In a crowd scene after the boy's escape someone refers to him as "damaged goods", and the characters all act as if no one who's lost his innocence so young could possibly come out of it with his sanity intact. Frankly, that attitude could be as harmful as the incident itself. Even more troubling was the notion - this was Nathan's puzzled interpretation of what the movie was saying - that Robbins would have been better off dead. At least it didn't make the assumption that he would inevitably abuse his own son as a result of being abused himself.

Nathan said he'd been told this was an "independent" film, and asked me what that meant, since there were obviously "real" actors in it. I don't know for sure, but I assume it meant that Clint Eastwood and his co-producers got the financing for it themselves, leaving whichever studio/distributor combo that's releasing it out of the process of re-writing it. Which would certainly explain the lack of an obviously Hollywood-rewritten ending. The ending does suffer a little, however, from an awkward attempt to put a final scene on a story that doesn't go for the easy ending. It takes us back to The Street Where IT Happened, for one last look at the characters, including a brief (wordless) interaction between Bacon and Penn, which just left me going "huh?"

Regardless, this film is a good example of why I like Clint Eastwood more behind the camera than in front of it (where he tended to play less interesting, flat characters like cowboys and Dirty Harry). This is an engrossing, thoughtful and thought-provoking movie, and I'd rather see a film of that sort that troubles me a bit, than the typical Hollywood fare of a forumulaic flick with nothing to disagree with.