I’m not sure when Mystic River will be released on DVD, but I’m looking very forward to seeing it again. It impressed me more than any other American film in 2003. To call it controversial would probably be something of a misnomer or, at best, only half-true, but few films provoked as much critical in-fighting last year.
Following my initial viewing of the film, I wrote:
I feel exhausted from having sat through this movie…
I’m not sure when Mystic River will be released on DVD, but I’m looking very forward to seeing it again. It impressed me more than any other American film in 2003. To call it controversial would probably be something of a misnomer or, at best, only half-true, but few films provoked as much critical in-fighting last year.
Following my initial viewing of the film, I wrote:
I feel exhausted from having sat through this movie, physically drained and utterly depressed. Compared with Mystic River, In the Bedroom would be a feel-good movie.
This, kids, is drama, nay, tragedy, so superbly, naturally played and orchestrated that its Shakespearean shadings end up feeling largely like archetypal coincidence.
As Jonathan Rosenbaum observed in his blurb, “deterministic” is certainly the word, no doubt about it. At one point in the film, Kevin Bacon’s character cynically mutters “Sending killers to jail is sending them where they’ve been headed their whole damn, pathetic lives. The dead stay dead.” Eastwood’s film is unrelentingly bleak and, at times, down-right unbearable. Its prologue is harrowing, its mid-section heart-wrenching, its final act gut-wrenching, in the most literal sense; my stomach sank and knotted during the film’s climactic cross-cut sequence and especially the devestating, revelatory encounter between two characters afterward–perhaps the best-acted scene in Mystic River, which is certainly saying something.
Indeed, this is the best ensemble in a film this year, all but one of whom are working easily within range of their best work if not at their dramatic peak. Sean Penn’s Jimmy is truly one of the tragic characters of our time, comparable to Michael Corleone in the second Godfather film. While his work might be less showy than that of most of his co-stars, Kevin Bacon has never been better and proves once and for all that he can be a damn-fine actor when he feels like actually putting it out there. Tim Robbins’ performance plays a very large part in making Mystic River such a profoundly disturbing and haunting film–and also why you’ll be quite shocked if you make the mistake of assuming that Eastwood’s film is a relatively conventional policier. Laurence Fishbourne’s character is perhaps the only one with little to lose in the film’s increasingly high emotional stakes; he deserves praise, as well, for transcending his limiting, necessary, mood-lightening role and instead creating a more multi-dimensional character than was probably written into the script. As wife to Robbins’ character, Marcia Gay Harden devoles, before our eyes, into a paranoid, deeply conflicted emotional wreck of a woman. In her scenes opposite Penn, she proves worthy of any accolades awarded her. Laura Linney is mostly fine, but her big scene, a Lady MaCBeth-like speech delivered to her husband (Penn), is, it seems to me, the film’s only significant misstep. While her reassurance of Jimmy might seem natural enough, the darker territory she eventually treads into feels like unnecessary additional weight for Eastwood and his audience to have to shoulder.
Mystic River is a great film, maybe even a rival to Unforgiven as Eastwood’s masterpiece. But it’s anything but an easy movie to sit through or, for that matter, to live with afterward. It gets under your skin.
After seeing it a second time and giving it a considerable amount of thought, I followed up, writing:
It’s been bugging me ever since I saw Mystic River what the purpose of Laura Linney’s Lady MacBeth scene might possibly be–and, no, I won’t buy the mere fact that it was in the book (don’t know whether it is or isn’t–haven’t read it) as a valid excuse. I went and saw the film tonight and a possible explaination finally dawned on me.
I think that the characters of Annabeth, Celeste, and to a lesser extent, Laura, Kevin Bacon’s estranged wife, function as examples of the way that women tend to react to different sorts of men. Tim Robbins’ character, Dave, is sulky, extremely passive-agressive and, I think it would be fair to say, somewhat psychotic (or “disturbed”). His wife, Celeste, is increasingly suspicious and even down-right frightened of him. Certainly the way he’s behaving has a large part to do with this, but I also think that men who are so fragile and moody have a harder time maintaining trust from their women because they don’t provide the sense of security that women *supposedly* desire. (I know: “If you men only new…”). Sean Penn’s character is bold, a born leader, and a sort of noble outlaw (at least in his tragically misled act of vigilante justice). He’s the sort of man that would provide that strong-armed broad-shouldered security and dependability that Robbins’ character sorely lacks. Kevin Bacon’s character is remote, emotionally restrained. His performance is mannered and subtle compared with the tremendous physicality of those of Penn and Robbins.
I think the key point of contrast here is the scenes where these three men confess, apologize, or attempt to apologize. Jimmy forces Dave to confess to murdering his daughter–a crime he did not commit–and when Dave outright lies in order to save his life, Jimmy executes him anyway, despite promising to spare his life if he confessed. Only when Kevin Bacon’s character apologizes for being remote does his wife finally talk to him over the phone. Finally, Jimmy admits to Annabeth that he has killed the wrong man, but before he can apologize or show remorse, Linney’s character reassures him that he has done the right thing.
It’s all about what can and cannot be excused by our individual nature and, also, I think, the way that married couples gradually grow similar in many respects. (Or maybe it’s not opposites that attract, after all.) Dave and Celeste are both weak, fragile people who crumble under pressure, which is why Annabeth goes so far during her speech as to rest the blame for Dave’s death on Celeste’s head rather than her husband’s. Just as he falsely admits to killing Katie, Celeste does indeed seal his fate by telling Jimmy that she believes her husand did kill Katie. Jimmy and Annabeth are both power-hungry and view revenge as a credible brand of justice. Both Bacon’s character and his wife are apparently distant emotionally and the physical distance between them (during one one-way conversation, he says that he can tell by the traffic that she’s in Brooklyn, while he’s in Boston) is represantive of this. Sure, it’s a bit of an obvious metaphor but I think it works nevertheless.
Annabeth’s validation of revenge is the important thing here. Dave’s innocence is an unfortunate but ultimately irrelevant by-product of Jimmy attempting to do what he felt was right. She surely subscribes to the dubious Kantian notion that it’s our intentions rather than their consequences that determine our moral character. I think it is here that Mystic River presents its most biting critique of vigilante justice (or “pre-emptive strikes”) because just as Kant’s philosophy runs in direct opposition with the way things function in reality (we ARE held responsible for the consequences that result from our actions not the intentions that inspire them), Dave, Jimmy’s childhood pal, IS dead and WAS innocent, period. What Eastwood correctly nails as being the key component is Jimmy’s action (murder) not his intentions (to avenge his daughter’s death) nor the tragic consequences. His point is that hot-headedly shooting first and asking questions later is always immoral, regardless of the shooter’s intentions and though an outcome like the one here can clearly intensify the sense of wrongdoing, wrong would have been done even if the person executed was guilty of their crime.
I later started quite a shitstorm over at the Oscarwatch.com forums (more than one person on there responded simply with a “fuck you”) with this post, contrasting the critical reception of Lost in Translation and American Splendor with that of Mystic River:
I’ve been thinking about the enormous critical success of two films that I liked, but didn’t love, that struck me as good, but not not great, and the more I ponder them, the more their critical kudos make sense.
Both are films that really appeal to (and flatter) two key critical demographics: cooler-than-thou hipster kids and jaded, mid-life-crisis-afflicted boomers. In fact, Lost in Translation’s two leads fulfill these two niches quite uncannily. Scarlett Johansson’s character is a smart, but cynical young lady who feels suffocated by her transparently hip husband (this personal subtext interests more than any other facet of the film); she lives a priviliged life, but seems bored by it. In this respect, Coppola doesn’t really confront Life per se so much as the shallow hypocrisy of hipsterdom, which is somewhat commendable, I suppose, but Ghost World did that far better anyway, while, through implication of what might be called negative social spage, speaking on the world outside of Enid’s more or less self-imposed cultural margin.
Bill Murray’s character is what draws in the jaded boomers because he is just that. He, too, is unhappy with his marriage, but more likely because it’s come to a sort of dispassionate stand-still, because all of the excitement and maybe love has been slowly drained out of it, perhaps largely due to distance, both literal and emotional. For Murray and the film’s older admirers, Lost in Translation is surely a lucrative fantasy, where the middle-aged, not particularly good-looking guy plays the quasi-romantic interest to the gorgeous young gamine. No less, rather than even attempt to criticize her characters’ self-centered brooding (much less their insular cultural condescension), Coppola thoroughly romanticizes (if not fetishizes) them. She presents Murray’s Bob as a veritable font of age-acquired wisdom, while Scarlett’s Charlotte is a vaguely idealistic young lady coping with equally vague disappointment. This is a film where the filmmaker’s preference for poetics negates any of the essential bite it might have otherwise possessed.
American Splendor’s appeal among hipsters and boomers alike is no less evident. The film’s two lead characters are prematurely cynical would-be hipsters (they’re certainly hopelessly hip, in retrospect, if not necessarily for their own day) who evolve progressively, and oh so naturally, into boomers, whose cynicism seems to be viewed by the filmmakers as simply an amusing rite of maturation. (Also, like Ghost World, the film is based on an underground comic, a definite hipster plus.) The film seems in love with its characters’ insufferable crankiness, and, in this regard, its even more dubiously reverent than Lost in Translation.
Mystic River is a film that holds no such appeals. Its style and sensibility are definitely studio, rather than indie (though when a Dreamworks Oscar drama is up for Indepdent Spirt awards, this has ultimately become a purely rhetoricial distinction), eliminating any sort of cool quotient. It’s a hard-nosed, rough-edged film, so fiercely critical of its characters that it’s difficult, if not down-right impossible, for viewers to cuddle up next to any of them. It’s cold in its harsh determism, while, at the same, uncomfortably emotional and truly tragic in a way so few American films are. Unlike American Splendor and Lost in Translation, it will probably never achieve a cult following because it’s an exhausting experience, by no means a pleasure to sit through.
Mystic River is also an unmistakably adult film, not just one that happens to center on adult characters. Eastwood is maybe too wise for his own good and perhaps a little world-weary, too, but he’s thankfully not complacement, and has made a film as thematically ambitious, if minorly flawed, as Lost in Translation and American Splendor are neatly wrapped in their instantly digestible little packagle. Digestible is another thing that Mystic River certainly is not. It leaves one feeling something like indigestion, because it provokes more questions than its able or ready to answer, and forces you to deal things that most films, Hollywood or indie, would surely shy away from.
These, for me, are some of the key aspects that distinguish great films from mere good ones.
A little while back, I received an email from Carloss Chamberlin, commenting on my “lonely defense/exploration of the ambiguities in Mystic River” and my “willingness to keep pushing in the face of the consensus.” He kindly sent me the link to his Mystic River piece over at Senses of Cinema: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/30/mystic_river.html It is an absolute must-read–hands-down the best thing I’ve seen written anywhere on the film.