Choppy River

I recently saw the 2003 movie Mystic River. Having just seen director Clint Eastwood's excellent Changeling, and expecting great things from Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon, and Tim Robbins, I was really looking forward to it.

Mystic River was not a bad movie. But it was a movie in no hurry to get anywhere interesting. It runs over two hours and fifteen minutes, but only about the last twenty of those minutes felt very dramatic to me.

The movie opens with a scene of three childhood friends, decades ago, enduring a trauma that affects them in different ways. It serves to inform the audience about the characters as the movie then unfolds on their modern, adult lives -- but in my view it fails to reflect on the actual narrative of the modern story. That story tracks the murder of the daughter of one of those three friends; the second is a detective investigating the crime; the third may know more about what really happened than he is revealing.

The story is arranged in such a way to give meaty acting moments to various performers. Sean Penn gets to have a spectacular breakdown upon the discovery of his daughter's body. Tim Robbins has a haunted sequence in which his wife (Marcia Gay Harden) catches him coming home in the dead of night with blood all over him. But while you can look at any of the sequences and think, "wow, they're really bringing it," they failed to pull me into the story. Just when it seemed like the momentum was starting, along would come a dull and distant scene to slow things back down.

Ultimately, the entire movie hangs on one of the three friends, Kevin Bacon's detective character, being oafishly bad at his job. He and investigative partner Laurence Fishburne ultimately crack the case and solve the mystery in about four minutes of screen time... but they don't do it until the end, when they happen to go back and look at a clue that we the audience were given about 30 minutes into the film. You have to accept that they were just too busy with other things to pay attention to this crucial bit, and to accept that, you have to accept that they're both exceptionally bad at their jobs. It's just a necessity of the plot to ensure that the mystery won't be solved until Sean Penn has a chance to confront Tim Robbins (the holdout).

Of course, that plot point is the entire movie. And it is part of those last 20 minutes I alluded to that actually does deliver. But it really sets up a Catch-22 situation. You have to watch the whole movie for the last act to land emotionally, but the whole movie is boring. But the whole movie almost has to be structured the way it is for it to arrive at this good last act in the way it does.

This film is based on a book, and I couldn't help but wonder if all this was somehow handled better on the page than on the screen. But unfortunately, the movie left me with such a poor taste that I don't want to pick up the book to find out.

A good ending attached to a movie somehow less than the sum of its parts? I can only rate it a C.