that childhood car
by
Douglas Messerli
Brian
Helgeland (screenplay, based on the book by Dennis Lehane), Clint Eastwood
(director) Mystic River / 2003
Clint
Eastwood’s Mystic River which, years after its original release, I saw
for the first time the other day, is a complex movie based on a kind of
standard trope: three young boys, close friends in a Boston neighborhood, grow
up to become social and moral opponents in the lives as adults. It happens all
the time, or, at least, so testosterone-driven male directors would like you to
believe: not only Eastwood, but Martin Scorsese, even the melodramatist Douglas
Sirk have all done variations of this theme.
Yet this film is far more complex than
most such films. After all, the young boys involved, Jimmy Markum, Sean Devine,
and Dave Boyle, seen playing street hockey in an early scene, behaving somewhat
badly as they attempt to write their names in freshly poured sidewalk concrete,
are suddenly accosted by a man pretending to be a police officer, who demands
their names and home locations before pulling away, quite inexplicably, with Dave,
demanding him to enter a car wherein sits a priest—the two of them abducting
the boy for 4 days while continuously sexually attacking him—abuse is too kind
of a word in this case of utter rape and sexual battery! That the male “tough”
behaving Eastwood would even dare to take on this subject is quite amazing. But
then this diehard Republican apologist has always been a rather surprising figure
in the celebrity and film world.
Actually, the two former boyhood friends
are also related by their manias and sense of violence. Jimmy is obsessed with
the fact that his 19-year old daughter Katie (Emily Rossum) is dating a boy,
Brendan Harris (Tom Guiry) whom he despises, for reasons that are not immediately
revealed. But the very fact that he is still attempting to control a 19-year
old child speaks a great deal about his macho persona. Certainly his wife, Annabeth (Laura Linney) is not happy in their
relationship.
In fact, women in this drama are nearly deleted,
including Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden), Dave’s wife, who suddenly is intimidated
to help her husband to “clean-up” after a mysterious event where he claims he
was forced to kill someone who accosted him.
The same night Jimmy’s daughter Katie is brutally
murdered, her body left mutualized after Dave has witnessed her in a local bar
with her girlfriends.
The plot of this mystery/murder film gets
even more complicated when the third childhood friend, Sean (Kevin Bacon), now
a police detective becomes involved in the search for Katie’s murderer.
In a sense, the different directions of
these three boyhood friends now reveal their extreme differences, as Dave
begins to suspect Jimmy’s involvement in his daughter’s death, while Sean, with
careful deliberation, attempts to track down the murder (ers).
It is as if all three boys were terribly
abused that day so long ago, and none of them can let it go. At least Sean,
with his partner, Detective Sergeant Whitey Powers (Laurence Fishburne) work
together to track down the true killers; yet Sean’s own wife, pregnant at the
time, has left him, so we must recognize him as another failed lover, another destroyed
member of this trio.
Convinced of Dave’s guilt, Jimmy corners
him and demands an admission of his activities. Hoping to free himself of his
certain death, Dave admits to the murder—despite the fact that the man he has
murdered was another child abuser, whom he had discovered in a car with a
child. Yet Jimmy, convinced of his righteous revenge shoots the former friend
in the head, releasing the body in the Mystic River of the title. In a sense,
it is a revenge for his own lack of courage all those years earlier, a cleansing
of his own guilt for not speaking out for his friend those long years ago, for
not being the child the two villains chose.
Finally, Sean reveals they have uncovered
the real killers, two kids, one of whom was the son of the notorious “Just Ray”
Harris,” the man who sent Jimmy to jail and the father of his daughter’s boyfriend.
As I told you this was a very complex story.
I might argue that Eastwood and his
screenplay writer, Brian Helgeland, might have simplified their story, based on
the novel by Dennis Lehane. But, obviously, that was just the point: the
interconnected stories of these young men are just part of the impossibly
tortured tales of young men and women growing up in what Eastland shows as an
almost sour sewer of the Mystic River flowing through Boston, which we later
discover in works such as in Tim McCarthy’s Spotlight. That great
Brahmin world of high ideals was never what it pretended to be.
The children in Eastwood’s movies were
just those kind of abused kids, who never quite recovered from their sudden
abuses on the streets in which they were simply playing hockey and memorializing
their names into the local pavement. They were innocents suddenly put into
another world apart from their imaginations. Can you blame them for being
failures as adults?
Los
Angeles, September 28, 2019
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (September 2019).
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