Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River" is so good, rich and satisfying a movie - enough that almost any other contemporary American film looks pathetic alongside it - every adult filmgoer should see and be open to its power, while knowing as little as possible about it in advance.
So, having put myself in the position of reviewing the movie, what am I to do? Talk around it, I guess. Provide some context for appreciating the filmmaker's achievement. And quietly celebrate.
Clint Eastwood has been a star of some sort since playing second lead Rowdy Yates in the TV series "Rawhide" in the early '60s, and a movie star since, on hiatus from that show in the mid '60s, he went to Italy and made three increasingly ambitious "spaghetti Westerns" for an awesomely talented director named Sergio Leone. His American movie stardom was firmly established when he started working with another, more versatile director, Donald Siegel, and achieved its early peak in 1971 with "Dirty Harry."
That same year, Eastwood made his directorial debut with "Play Misty for Me" (to which he persuaded Siegel to contribute a droll cameo). But even before his card in the credits made it official, Eastwood had taken a hand in directing the films in which he starred. On "Dirty Harry" it was reported that he and his mentor had gone so far as to divide scenes or shots into two categories - the "clintus" and the "siegelini" - according to who was best suited, or just more genially disposed, to complete the task at hand.
It didn't take long for Eastwood to establish a production company of his own, Malpaso, and to gather a cadre of artisans and fellow professionals on whom he could rely to turn out a decent movie on time and on budget. Sometimes "decent" was a reach; Eastwood promoted a couple of stunt coordinators to the director's chair, with predictably lackluster results. But Eastwood himself remained essentially the man in charge, with an increasingly apparent signature that went far beyond his onscreen posing with oversized guns. In 1976 he fired critics'-darling Philip Kaufman from "The Outlaw Josey Wales" and went on to direct the movie himself (it was voted onto the National Film Registry a few years back). And when, in 1984, he appeared in the striking, psychologically dark thriller "Tightrope," the movie was so clearly personal - and personally revelatory - that critics boosting it onto their Ten Best lists ignored Richard Tuggle's credit as writer-director and proclaimed it an Eastwood film.
Mostly, from there on out, Eastwood made no bones about it. By the time he won two Academy Awards for producing and directing 1992's "Unforgiven" (one of the few instances in Hollywood history when the Best Picture of the Year was the best picture of the year), the man once known to America as Rowdy Yates had more than 20 feature-directing credits. Most of them are, to say the least, decent movies; even the off, or aggressively oddball, entries are fascinating. A goodly handful - the Charlie Parker biopic "Bird," "The Bridges of Madison County," the grievously underrated "A Perfect World" and "True Crime" - are superb. "Unforgiven," of course, is a masterpiece. And now, so is "Mystic River."
As far back as 1968's "Coogan's Bluff," and through the '70s and '80s, a lot of Clint Eastwood's movies have begun, ended and/or been punctuated with aerial photography.
Mostly it tended to seem a mannerism, a gratuitous or only casually motivated device to persuade the audience they were seeing something hip and up-to-date, something cool, like the pleasant but undistinguished jazz noodling that, more often than not, accompanied the images. Camera flew in over a (usually) nighttime city at the beginning - often Dirty Harry's San Francisco, but also New Orleans, New York, L.A. - and pulled out again at film's end. It was a way of announcing, going in, that the movie is starting and it will happen here; and, going out, letting people decompress from the intervening mayhem, gather their coats under the end credits, and leave.
Something changed in the '90s. Coincidentally or not, Eastwood won his Oscar for a film in which he kept his camera firmly planted on the ground. His next movie, "A Perfect World," mostly received mixed reviews and has been little remarked since its 1993 release. But it was an estimable piece of work. As an actor, Eastwood graciously took a backseat to costar Kevin Costner, and as a director, led that costar to arguably his finest, and certainly most disturbing, performance. Moreover, "A Perfect World" definitively redeemed the aerial gambit that had so often seemed merely glib embellishment in previous films. It begins with an unsettling closeup of a blank white mask trembling in some long grass. The mask looks at once like a child's plaything and one of those classical Greek symbols theaters sport on their prosceniums. The image is unexplained till film's end, when a helicopter - its propwash accounting for the trembling - lifts away from a Texas field filled with death and profound sadness, simultaneously marking the rescue of a traumatized child and the inevitable price paid by another, full-grown child for a life of crime and madness and pain.
I was reminded of "A Perfect World" while watching "Mystic River." It's as though the particular case history of malign destiny and injustice recounted in the earlier film had metastasized, become the submerged saga of an entire community. How submerged, how much of a saga, we cannot know till the story has all been told. Its cumulative impact is devastating, the measure of a vision that, almost uniquely in American movies, deserves to be called tragic.
That tragic stature is reached for in a lot of ways throughout the movie. Certainly in the performances by Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Marcia Gay Harden, Laura Linney and Laurence Fishburne (Eastwood himself stays offscreen this time out). It is an ensemble so fine, strong, and beautifully attuned - to each other and to the deepest, saddest, most terrifying contradictions almost all of the characters contain - that to honor any one of them without honoring the others come awards time will seem a kind of violation. (What does Eastwood do to actors anyway, that in "True Crime" Dennis Leary for the first and almost only time played someone other than Denis Leary, and that in this film we forget what public assholes Sean Penn and Tim Robbins incorrigibly are, and weep for them?)
But the movie had me by the throat before any of the players had a real chance to do his or her thing. It started with the opening scene, a sort of prologue that we don't realize is a prologue until, with nary a wasted frame or gratuitous turn of the screw, it's over and replaced by the quarter-century-later present tense of the film-proper. A key image of the prologue is of a car driving off down a street, straight away from the camera, and a boy's face looking out the back window of it as his friends and his life and his future are left behind. Something like that image recurs only a few moments - but 25 years - later in screen time. And as another car drives and another life recedes, the camera cranes up as naturally as a cloud crossing the sky, to watch the car and take in the human geography of the neighborhood street and look over roofs at other streets surrounding. And then a different camera - yet somehow the same one, in another shot that is somehow an extension of the first shot - descends on a bridge over the river of the title. There has been a horrible auto accident on the bridge, and although we can tell after a moment that "our" car was not involved, we know that somehow "our" car was on its own course toward doom. And nothing could have deflected it.
The progression of those shots sounds so simple. Moreover, all of us can understand the principle of "the god's-eye view," the high angle that looks down on human affairs from an Olympian height and sees the patterns of it all. The idea is even a bit of a cliché when you put it like that. But "Mystic River" doesn't put it like that. And the patterns - of a world where it is so hard, almost impossible, to do the right thing, where a man may turn into a monster because the monster is what he most fears - break your heart. The only consolation is lucidity, and that's delivered by the assured, attentive eye of the finest classicist in American film today.
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