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As opposed to a viewers perspective, this is a great article through a film critics perspective and how well the movie ties in with its intended themes.

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Mystic River (United States, 2003) A movie review by James Berardinelli

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Mystic River (United States, 2003) A movie review by James Berardinelli

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With Mystic River, Clint Eastwood has rebounded nicely from the failure of his mediocre previous effort, Blood Work. Absent from the screen but behind the camera for the first time since Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Eastwood concentrates all of his efforts on producing and directing, and the result is the Hollywood icon's best effort in nearly a decade. The script, written by Brian Helgeland, remains reasonably faithful to Dennis Lehane's novel. This is a powerful tale of crime, guilt, and punishment - a drama that incorporates elements of whodunit mystery/thrillers and police procedurals with a richly textured three-character play.

Those three characters are Jimmy (Sean Penn), Sean (Kevin Bacon), and Dave (Tim Robbins). When we first meet them in a quiet Boston suburb, they are kids playing street hockey. A car drives up, and a gruff man gets out and identifies himself as a cop. After intimidating them (they had been "defacing" public property by scrawling their names in wet cement), he forces Dave to get into the car, then drives off. As it turns out, the man is a pedophile, not a cop, and Dave is not seen for four days, after he escapes from his abductors.

The bulk of the story takes place some 30 years later. Over the years, Jimmy, Sean, and Dave have grown apart. Jimmy, a grocery store owner with a criminal background, is married to his second wife, Annabeth (Laura Linney), and has three daughters. The eldest of these, Katie (Emmy Rossum), is the apple of his eye. Sean, a police detective for the Massachusetts State PD, is estranged from his wife. Dave, who has never fully recovered from his abduction, has a wife, Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden), and a young son.

Then, one night, events bring these three old friends back into each others' spheres. Katie is found murdered, and Sean and his partner, Whitey (Laurence Fishburne), are the investigating officers. One of the chief suspects turns out to be Dave, who returned home late on the night of the murder with blood on his hands and an implausible alibi. Meanwhile, as Sean begins the official investigation, Jimmy makes inquiries on his own. He is determined to find the murderer before the police so that he can mete out his own brand of justice.

It is clear from the beginning that Mystic River has aspirations to be more than a conventional murder mystery. The added layer of complexity arises through the psychological depth of the characters and the importance of their past relationship. Although a gulf of time has separated the lives of these men, that single childhood event has forged a bond nothing can sever. The image of Dave, looking forlornly through the backseat window as he is driven away, will haunt Jimmy and Sean to their dying days.

Mystic River would not be the experience it is without the raw powerhouse performance of Sean Penn, whose grief and rage are so forcefully expressed that they bring tears to the eyes. Eastwood shows us just enough of the tender relationship between Katie and her father to make it genuinely painful when he has to identify her body at the morgue. Penn is justly regarded by many critics as one of America's top actors, and his work in Mystic River will only enhance that reputation. This is the second most effective performance on Penn's resume, following only Dead Man Walking.

Tim Robbins is generally regarded as a better director than an actor, but, given the right role (as in The Shawshank Redemption), he can seem perfectly cast. Dave, whose emotions and (to a degree) personality were neutered in childhood, is such a part. Robbins is consistently low-key and doesn't do much in the way of emoting, and that's precisely what's required in this case. Likewise, Kevin Bacon's approach to Sean is understated, since the character does his best to remain emotionally detached from the situation (as befits a good cop). There are occasional cracks in Sean's façade, and Bacon allows us to catch glimpses of his inner turmoil.

Many times in character-based movies like this, it's the supporting performers who make the difference between a good film and a great one. In this case, Eastwood has chosen his entire cast wisely. The actors filling secondary roles - Laurence Fishburne, Laura Linney, Marcia Gay Harden, and young Tom Guiry (as Katie's secret boyfriend) - all do solid work, taking some of the burden off the top-billed trio.

Mystic River has only one misstep, and that occurs at the conclusion (and is reflective of problems with the book's final pages). Instead of ending cleanly, at the point when everything is in place for the rolling of the credits, the movie drags on for two unfortunate, unnecessary scenes. This superfluous epilogue not only pads the running length, but commits minor character assassination and disallows the possibility of things concluding on a dramatically high note. It is Eastwood and editor Joel Cox's only blunder. (This is the kind of material one would expect to see as an "alternate/rejected ending" on a DVD.)

Getting the tone right for such a complex, genre-crossing story is a tricky thing, but Eastwood masters it. Mystic River is suffused by a slightly ominous, sad atmosphere. There are none of the cheesy shocks one often expects from murder mysteries. One could easily argue that, although plot is important, Eastwood puts a greater emphasis on character. The movie moves from one tragedy to a greater one, and we understand how every event impacts each of the protagonists.

With an intelligent, insightful screenplay and a riveting key performance, Eastwood has combined his cinematic ingredients in a mixture that cries out for Oscar consideration. Mystic River is haunting and melancholy, and the portraits it paints of Jimmy, Dave, and Sean will stay with you after you have left the theater. In a time when the goal of most movies is to offer instant gratification with no aftertaste, this quality should be both valued and praised.

Mystic River (United States, 2003)

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With Mystic River, Clint Eastwood has rebounded nicely from the failure of his mediocre previous effort, Blood Work. Absent from the screen but behind the camera for the first time since Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Eastwood concentrates...

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Review of the film from Christopher Orr of TheAtlantic, great review from a viewers perspective as opposed to a critic.

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It's hard to believe, but Mystic River is Clint Eastwood's twenty-fourth feature film as a director. Since his debut behind the camera (he was also in front of it) in Play Misty For Me in 1971, he has directed more movies than either Martin Scorcese or Steven Spielberg. Some are memorable ( Unforgiven), some are awful ( Absolute Power), and at least one is equal parts each ( A Perfect World; if you've seen it, you know which part is which). Mystic River is his most complex and assured effort to date, a near-classic that falters due to an accretion of many small flaws and one large one.

Adapted from the novel by Dennis Lehane, the film, released on video this month, begins with three eleven-year-old boys in working-class Boston: Sean, the good kid; Jimmy, the hard case; and Dave, the unpopular kid trying desperately to fit in. The three boys are writing their names in wet sidewalk cement one day when a car rolls up with two men in it, apparently cops, who take the boys to task for their vandalism. The men put Dave into the car, saying they are taking him to his mother to tell her what he's done. But the men are not cops, and they do not drive Dave to his mother. Rather, they lock him in a basement and abuse him for four days until he escapes. When Dave returns home, everyone recognizes him as "damaged goods." Flash ahead about a quarter of a century. Sean (Kevin Bacon) is now a policeman; Jimmy (Sean Penn) is an ex-con with a wife (Laura Linney) and three daughters; and Dave (Tim Robbins) is still damaged goods, shambling through life with the look of someone who knows that only bad things will ever happen to him. After a late night of drinking, Robbins comes home to his wife (Marcia Gay Harden) covered with someone else's blood, telling her that he fought, and may have killed, a would-be mugger. The next day, the body of Penn's beautiful 19-year-old daughter is found beaten and murdered in a neighborhood park. Thus the three boys are brought together again: Bacon working the case, Penn seeking vengeance, and Robbins, whose behavior grows more and more erratic, gradually emerging as the prime suspect.

The film unfolds as a crime epic in the mold of L.A. Confidential, with Eastwood juggling characters and storylines masterfully. The performances are generally strong (including a delightful uncredited cameo as a liquor store owner by Eli Wallach, the "Ugly" to Clint's "Good" way back when) and the themes--of grief and vengeance, love and betrayal, and past acts that will forever haunt the present--are powerful. But in the end, not powerful enough; or more precisely, maybe too powerful for the film's own good.

As a director, Eastwood has a tendency toward heavy-handedness, particularly in films (e.g., Unforgiven) and scenes that he believes to be Important. He over-solemnizes the material, perhaps out of fear that he'll be considered just another movie star moonlighting as a director. By and large, Eastwood restrains this tendency in Mystic River, but at crucial moments he can't help himself, and the portentousness creeps back in. Immediately following the opening scene in which young Dave is abducted, we cut to Robbins, as the grown-up Dave, walking down the same city block with his own son. Noticing the spot on the sidewalk where the boys had written their names in the cement he stops and stares. But rather than allow Robbins's face to convey the feelings that the sight brings up in him, Eastwood intervenes, flashing back to a shot of the abductors' car, with young Dave in the backseat, pulling away down the block. I don't know whether it's a lack of confidence in his audience or in himself that convinces Eastwood we must be reminded of a scene that took place less than five minutes before; either way, it's disheartening. A more serious stumble occurs in the scene that won Sean Penn his Oscar. As the police examine his daughter's body in the park, Penn breaks through a line of patrolmen, howling like a wounded animal, "Is that my daughter in there?" It is a raw, powerful moment, one that it would have been nice to see unfold further. (What will happen when the rage leaves Penn's body?) But Eastwood seems uncomfortable with this level of emotional intensity, and so quickly extinguishes it with cheap sentiment: The orchestra swells over Penn's cries, and we are treated to an aerial shot of the girl's body that slowly pans upward toward heaven. It's not subtle.

The script, by Brian Helgeland--who did such a masterful job of carving L.A. Confidential out of James Ellroy's sprawling, impossible novel--also disappoints. This adaptation is a much more faithful one, and not to Helgeland's credit. A silly storyline involving Bacon's estranged wife, who calls his cell phone constantly but refuses to speak, is whittled down to the point of meaninglessness but left in the film nonetheless. Thoughts that Lehane places in his characters minds, Helgeland transfers to their mouths, where they come out stilted and absurd. ("What the hell am I going to tell him?" Bacon asks his partner as they examine Penn's daughter. "Hey Jimmy, God said you owed another marker and he came to collect?")

But the film's central flaw, where errors of direction, writing, and acting intersect, is Robbins's character, Dave. The particular burden of crime stories, at least those that are framed as mysteries, is that their solutions must be neither obvious nor implausible. There are many ways of accomplishing this, from the perfect crimes (and more perfect detectives) of Agatha Christie and her heirs to the forensic expeditions you can now find on television most nights. In Mystic River, the narrative device that enables the mystery is the damaged, unfathomable mind of Dave. Could he have shed his mild manners to brutally murder a young girl? How else to explain the unpersuasive and ever-shifting lies he tells about his actions the night of the murder? What did he do to wind up covered in blood, and why?

Robbins, an actor who can carry himself with eerie, forceful stillness, would seem the perfect casting for lost, haunted Dave. But his Oscar for the role notwithstanding, Robbins never quite finds the thread of the character. He is by turns innocent and malevolent, timid and aggressive, naïve and knowing. And while one can imagine these traits coexisting in a psyche as fractured as Dave's, Robbins never shows us how they fit together. The tough, clever Dave who bullies and outsmarts the police during his interrogation ("He just kicked our asses in there," Bacon laments afterward) comes out of nowhere, in part because the early glimmers of anger and guile he shows in the novel are missing from the film. (In the former, for instance, he characterizes his alleged mugger as "some crackhead nigger psycho"; in the latter, it's cleaned up to "this guy.") Helgeland also omits, except for one vague reference, Lehane's disclosure that Dave has fantasized about molesting boys as he himself was molested--a revelation with profound implications for why he does what he does. And surely there are better ways of showing Dave's internal torment than having him explain it to his son: "Sometimes the man wasn't a man at all," he begins, before launching into what is doubtless the most extended metaphor ever uttered by someone without an MFA. "He was the boy, the boy who escaped from wolves, an animal of the dusk, invisible, silent, living in a world the others never saw, a world of fireflies, unseen except as a flare in the corner of your eye, vanished by the time you turn your head toward it."

Because Dave never really coheres into a recognizable human being, he is laid bare as a plot device. He is the psycho ex machina. (Annoyingly enough, he's not the only one in the film.) Why did he say and do what he did? Because he's crazy. Case closed. Rather than resolve the mystery by revealing the underlying logic of what has transpired, the film declares that there was no underlying logic. Much of the tragedy that took place could have been avoided if poor, damaged Dave had behaved in a way that made even a modicum of sense. By untethering Dave from reality, Mystic River untethers itself, and ultimately floats away.
The Home Movies List:
Five Oscars in Search of a Performance

Michael Caine (The Cider House Rules). Michael Caine has appeared in more than 70 films and this may be among the least convincing performances he's delivered in any of them. If he hadn't been playing a doctor who performs abortions, would Hollywood have paid any attention at all?

Kim Basinger (L.A. Confidential). There seems to be a rule that in films featuring several standout performances the Oscar nomination will go to the biggest star, regardless of merit. (This is also how Tom Cruise was nominated for Magnolia, though in that case they at least had the sense not to let him take home the hardware.) And for the record: Kim Basinger does not look like Veronica Lake, and does not look better than Veronica Lake.

Russell Crowe (Gladiator). Two and a half hours of brooding punctuated by death. The most generous interpretation is that the Academy felt bad for having stiffed him in L.A. Confidential and passed him over in The Insider. Or maybe they were afraid of being beaten up.

Al Pacino (Scent of a Woman). Thank God no one told Pacino earlier that this was how to win an Oscar. If they had, his entire career might have resembled the Tourettic output of the last decade.

Marisa Tomei (My Cousin Vinnie). Someday I'll wake up and this won't have happened.

This post originally appeared at TNR.com.

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It's hard to believe, but Mystic River is Clint Eastwood's twenty-fourth feature film as a director. Since his debut behind the camera (he was also in front of it) in Play Misty For Me in 1971, he has directed more movies than either Martin Scorcese or Steven Spielberg.

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Great article on how well Clint Eastwood's adaptation resonates with the original novel and how well it stays true to it.

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Book versus movie: Clint Eastwood’s ‘Mystic River’ stays true to Dennis Lehane’s original

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Book versus movie: Clint Eastwood’s ‘Mystic River’ stays true to Dennis Lehane’s original

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At one point in Dennis Lehane's 2001 novel Mystic River, a police detective asks his colleague as the murder they are investigating takes an absurd turn: "What, we're starring in a movie now?"

The remark proved prescient. Two years later, the novel was adapted for the big screen by Clint Eastwood. The 2003 movie stars Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon as three childhood friends who are driven apart by one tragedy and pulled into each other's orbits by another years later.

Jimmy Marcus (Penn), Dave Boyle (Robbins) and Sean Devine (Bacon) live in a working-class town divided into the Flats, for those at the lower end of the chain, and the Point, for higher-level employees. Their relationship is as fragmented as their neighbourhood. The cracks become most evident when Dave is abducted by two men posing as police officers. While Dave escapes from his kidnappers' clutches, he loses a part of himself, and his friendships, to the tragedy.

The three go on to lead vastly different lives. Jimmy becomes a local gang leader of sorts but decides to "go straight" for his daughter's sake, Sean becomes a police officer and Dave ambles through a life of mediocrity, struggling to reconcile his external world with his inner angst.

Decades later, when Jimmy's 19-year-old daughter is brutally murdered, Sean is assigned the investigating officer in the case. The same night that Katie is killed, Dave comes home with blood on his hands. As their lives intersect once again, the old tragedy continues to leave its mark.

Mystic River is centred on a murder, but Lehane's novel is much more than a mystery. Filled with morbid insight into the workings of the world, it has the makings of a tragedy.

Serendipity works in inverse in Mystic River - two seemingly disconnected events seem to influence each other in unfortunate ways. Lehane suggests that Dave's kidnapping set in motion a series of events that culminate in Katie's murder. When Dave was abducted, Sean and Jimmy were also present. The fake policemen rounded the three of them up on a flimsy pretense, but asked only Dave to get into the car. Sean and Jimmy neither came along nor stopped Dave - as adolescents, they knew no better.

The hidden link between that betrayal and the tragedy that befalls Jimmy's family is articulated by the grieving father at the police station after Katie's body is discovered. "You ever think how the most minor decisions can change the entire direction of your life?" Jimmy asks. "...Say you and me, Sean, say we got in that car with Dave Boyle...life would have been a very different thing." Jimmy then goes on to conclude that had they shared that tragic experience with Dave, Katie would never have been born and would hence never have been murdered.

What Sean dismisses as the curious musings of a grieving man prove to be a motif of sorts in Mystic River, forold sorrows continue to inform new wounds in the novel.

These themes are retained in Eastwood's film adaptation, which, for the most part, does not veer from Lehane's course. Screenwriter Brian Helgeland retains much of the author's powerful dialogue, and the actors are well suited to their parts - Penn and Robbins won Academy Awards for their performances.

The movie mirrors the brooding tone of Lehane's novel. This is not a archetypal thriller with rapid cuts and edge-of-seat action. It's a mystery that unfolds gradually, every scene tinted with the darkness of the world in which it it set.

But the wisdom of the book is stripped down on the screen. To accommodate Lehane's 450-plus pages into a 138-minute run-time, Eastwood has to filter out all that is not germane to the plot. However, the slow-burn of the literary source allows Lehane to explore the characters in detail, which is crucial to a book where the external action is as significant as the characters' psychological explorations.

While the film takes us to the discovery of Katie's body in the first 30 minutes, Lehane's novel brings readers to that conclusion after a hundred pages of agonising over her fate, the build-up giving the author a chance to evocatively describe the backdrop against which this crime unfolds.

The biggest casualty of this brevity are the female characters of Mystic River, who are missing from much of the action. Included in the book largely as wives and mothers, only their thoughts give readers access to their depths. For the most part, they stay on the sidelines, influencing outcomes in pivotal but hidden ways.

Annabelle, Jimmy's wife and Katie's stepmother, is "one tough goddamned woman", according to the book. We see but a glimpse of that in one of the final scenes of the film, in the character played by Laura Linney.

Celeste, Dave's wife, is more indecipherable, both a victim of her circumstances and a catalyst in the plot. In the movie, her character, played by Marcia Gay Harden, gets short shrift. A paper titled Beneath the Surface: An Examination of Masculinity and Femininity in Dennis Lehane's Mystic River argues that the author, while depicting sexist gender norms and patriarchal structures in his novel, also covertly undercuts these, especially through Annabeth and Dave's characters. That nuance, if it does exist in the book, is missing from the film.

Mystic River the movie works well as a mystery-drama with a tragic undertone. As a book, Lehane's Mystic River is a tragic exploration of the human condition first, and a murder mystery second.

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Book versus movie: Clint Eastwood's 'Mystic River' stays true to Dennis Lehane's original

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At one point in Dennis Lehane's 2001 novel Mystic River, a police detective asks his colleague as the murder they are investigating takes an absurd turn: "What, we're starring in a movie now?" The remark proved prescient. Two years later, the novel was adapted for the big screen by Clint Eastwood.

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Insight on several actors and their opinion on the film, and how well the film comes together from their perspectives.

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27 Things We Learned From the ‘Mystic River’ Commentary

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27 Things We Learned From the ‘Mystic River’ Commentary

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27 Things We Learned From the ‘Mystic River’ Commentary

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Clint Eastwood’s latest film, American Sniper, opens wide this week on its way to some possible (and probable) Oscar nominations, and while I haven’t seen it yet I hope it’s a return to quality filmmaking. It’s been some time since he’s directed a truly engrossing and entertaining film, and one of h…

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Thorough article that goes through the major plot points and how well the story ties together, from beginning to end.

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Here is the end of Mystic River explained.

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Great insight on the actors' stance on the film and how significant the story is in the film.  The interview also shows great glimpses of the film.

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Clint Eastwood provides some insight on why he chose this film adaptation and the significance in this fate driven story.

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Clint Eastwood – Mystic River - Gerald Peary - interviews

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Gerald Peary’s cinema articles have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The Boston Globe, and in film periodicals around the world, including Film Comment, Cineaste, and Sight and Sound.