Mystic River ** (Worth seeing) Directed by Clint Eastwood Written by Brian Helgeland With Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne, Marcia Gay Harden, Kevin Chapman, Laura Linney, Adam Nelson, Emmy Rossum, and Cameron Bowen.
But the larger issue isn’t the degree to which Eastwood’s movie qualifies as art. It’s why reviewers are so desperate to establish its artistic pedigree. Many debates have been waged in the past–often sparked by Pauline Kael–about whether Eastwood the director deserves to be considered an artist rather than a poseur or a popular entertainer. But since Kael herself often, and rightly, celebrated popular entertainment and certain forms of chicanery as legitimate art, there’s something peevish about her objections to him.
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I have to assume that reviewers who get this worked up about how much a work of art is a work of art–and Denby is far from the only one–want to buttress some ideological and psychosexual program they fear won’t be taken seriously enough without the label of “art.” Since I have doubts about the ideological and psychosexual program of Mystic River–especially the part implying that the thirst for revenge is an honorable adult emotion–I should stress that Eastwood’s artistry is equally relevant to my argument. 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. If artistic effects are often enhanced by being perceived as artistic, propagandistic effects, regardless of the intent behind them, are often enhanced by not being perceived as propagandistic.
A quarter of a century later we catch up with these three boys as adults. Dave had written only the first two letters of his name in the cement before he was abducted–a brilliant literary conceit whereby “Da,” baby talk for “dad,” symbolizes his arrested development after his trauma (which the movie views as the only significant event in his life), just as the ball lost in the gutter symbolizes his eventual fate. Now he’s a conscientious father, though otherwise he’s fairly dysfunctional, socially and professionally. Tim Robbins’s performance–by far the most remarkable I’ve seen from him–conveys his character’s gnarled repression almost immediately through his voice and body language.
Jimmy promises to let Dave live if he’ll “tell the truth” and “admit” that he killed Katie, which forces Dave to lie. That Jimmy kills him anyway–not for lying but for supposedly telling the truth–isn’t allowed to interfere for a second with Jimmy’s status as tragic hero rather than pathetic, retarded monster. Dave, who committed a desperate, vengeful murder of his own around the time Katie was killed, is seen as pathetic and retarded because of his childhood trauma, though his victim is viewed as another bit of collateral damage that needn’t concern us; there’s a tacit assumption that because he was a sexual molester, he probably deserved to die.
Also dismaying are Eastwood’s two-dimensional depictions of Celeste and Annabeth and his one-dimensional depiction of Sean’s wife–whom we don’t see and who scarcely exists on any level except as a thematic and structural prop. Apparently Sean wasn’t paying enough attention to her when they were together, though by the end of the film he’s learned his lesson. She’s there simply to provide some narrative symmetry and the basis for a redemptive, if highly qualified, happy ending.
