Blending many great performances with an interesting story, Mystic River is an exemplary crime drama that actually won Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor in 2004. Although a good majority of the story was predictable and some subplots unnecessary, Clint Eastwood delivers a great drama that definitely deserves more recognition.
The standout part of this movie were the performances. Jimmy, played by Sean Penn, Dave, played by Tim Robbins, and Sean, played by Kevin Bacon, are three friends who grew up together but ended up leading very different lives. Jimmy was a convenience store owner who has a shady past with the mob, Dave is a married stay-at-home dad, and Sean is a private investigator for the Boston Police Department. This was a very interesting way to tell the story, by bringing together old friends after a tragedy had happened. This film explored all of their backgrounds very well and gave enough time for each character to develop. The best performance in this film comes from Sean Penn, as seen in his Oscar win. His portrayal of Jimmy was excellent and the raw emotion that was shown when he found out his daughter had been killed (whoops, spoiler) was incredible. Robbins was the other fantastic performance in this movie. His character of Dave had a very troubled childhood because of getting kidnapped and raped as a young boy. Robbins portrayed his character so well and brought out that repressed trauma excellently. The other best part of this film was the direction from Clint Eastwood. Even though many scenes dragged on for way too long and the entire film was almost two and a half hours, the pacing was decent and Eastwood kept the story moving along nicely. And there was, of course, the Eastwood-style ending of not letting the audience know exactly how it ends. This sense of ambiguity worked very well, even though I would still prefer some clarification.
There were a few parts of this film that definitely could have been improved on, however. Many parts of the story were either predictable or unnecessary. I feel that the big reveal at the end was handled very poorly, as it took the easy way out. The entire film is built up for the audience to believe that Dave is the one who killed Jimmy's daughter. The entire time, I knew that Dave was going to die eventually somehow, but his "confession" was lame. He used the very generic "I lost my innocence and didn't want her to lose hers" and was very lazy writing, especially for his character. When it turned out though that the young kids were actually responsible for killing Jimmy's daughter, it was very boring. In my opinion, that explanation was very weak writing and didn't satisfy any of my previous assumptions or questions. The other bad part of this film was the writing behind Kevin Bacon's character Sean. While him being a cop was helpful for advancing the story, he did not have any interesting background at all. His only subplot was his wife who had left him and kept calling him. This subplot was unnecessary and did not add any substance whatsoever to Bacon's character. My last issue with this film was, unfortunately, Laurence Fishburne's character Whitey. His first few lines of dialogue in the film accompanied by his colloquialisms made him out to be the stereotypical "ghetto cop." I was very worried about this at first, but they seemed to abandon that aspect quickly.
Mystic River is an engaging, family-driven drama which manages to put out some incredible performances despite its relatively dull plot. I would strongly recommend this film if you are an Eastwood, Penn, or Robbins fan, but not if you are looking for a strongly emotional movie.
My Rating: ★★★
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