Okay, just for the record, Mystic River didn’t endear itself to me as much as it did prior to my having read the brilliant novel by Dennis Lehane it is based on. But once I realised that its well nigh impossible to compress a dense 450-odd page book into a 2-hour movie, and stopped comparing, I agreed to the fact that this is a damn good movie all right. Companionship of three Boston buddies got silently torn apart when one of the boys got picked up by two strangers; and now a couple of decades later, Sean, a police detective, Jimmy, a former convict, and Dave, a recluse forever scarred by his past, are forced to come together when Jimmy’s teenage daughter is found brutally murdered. The movie boasts of two awesome performances by Sean Penn and Tim Robbins, as the devastated dad and complex man-boy, respectively, with competent supports by Kevin Bacon, Laura Linney and Laurence Fishburn. The relentlessly dark and brooding movie, with its fair share of fatalism, and disturbing albeit compelling references to the vicious cycle of violence, guilt and retribution, has been given a shot in the arm by the ominous tone of the script, arresting cinematography and narrative pacing that has defied genre conventions with gutsy bravado. Agreed, the movie isn’t without its flaws and omissions; nonetheless, this will rank very high among Clint Eastwood’s oeuvre.
Director: Clint Eastwood
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Urban Drama/Mystery
Language: English
Country: US