MOVIE REVIEW
'Mystic River' brooding and deep

By Jack Garner
Gannett News Service

In his Oscar-winning "Unforgiven," filmmaker Clint Eastwood expanded the traditional Western formula with deeply felt layers of moral ambiguity, emotional pain, regret and guilt. Now, with the equally brilliant "Mystic River," he does the same thing for the modern crime film.

MYSTIC RIVER Rated R Four Stars (Excellent)

"Mystic River" stars Kevin Bacon, Sean Penn and Laura Linney.

"Mystic River" wraps itself around two distinct crimes — paced 25 years apart — in a working class Boston neighborhood. And in lesser hands with lesser purpose, the film could easily have been little more than a taut but typical police procedural.

In the late '70s, three 12-year-old boys — Jimmy, Dave and Sean — are playing street hockey. Two men drive up, claim they're cops (which they aren't) and kidnap Dave for what'll turn out to be four horrific days of pedophilia before he manages to escape.

Twenty-five years later, the three still live in the area and have maintained casual friendships, though nothing more. Jimmy (Penn) manages a corner store, has a wife (Linney) and three children. Dave is a handyman with a wife (Harden) and son. Sean (Bacon) is a cop whose wife has recently left him. They're brought together when Jimmy's 19-year-old daughter is brutally murdered. How (or if) the two horrible events are connected is what drives the film and stirs the emotions.

And it's the emotions and their aftermath that interests Eastwood. Thanks to fine writing by novelist Dennis Lehane and screenwriter Brian Helgeland, and Eastwood's precise, evocative, economic direction, "Mystic River" resonates more deeply than any film this year.

In a riveting (but never flashy) display of mature moviemaking, Eastwood perfectly portrays working-class life in a Boston neighborhood. He and cinematographer Tom Stern train the cameras with artful subtlety, framing the tragic events with the sort of day-to-day rituals — a child's first communion, a teenager's tabletop dance of celebration, a grieving father stocking beer in an ice chest — that increase the sense of reality.

Heck, Eastwood has even composed the film's near-perfect orchestral score.

More importantly, Eastwood successfully juggles the stories and emotions of several rich characters, maintaining the narrative's unity. Each character fits like a piece in a finely crafted jigsaw. Just when you think one of the characters — Linney's for example — serves no purpose, she's given a mighty one.

Yet the masterful Eastwood never allows the various characters and story threads to seem manipulated or contrived; they all evolve naturally within this affecting human story. You feel the raw agony left in the wake of two tragic incidents and you witness the awful choices triggered by such raw emotions. The man who once said "Go ahead, make my day" now shows us the long night that follows.

Rated R for profanity and violence.