Eastwood: Mystic River (2003)

Although it’s been acclaimed as one of his greatest works, Mystic River is quite an unusual Eastwood film. Based on the novel by Dennis Lehane, it’s about the friendship between three working-class Boston men – Jimmy Markum (Sean Penn), Dave Boyle (Tim Robbins) and Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon) – whose lives are united by two crimes, committed years apart. Taking its cues from Lehane’s prose style, Brian Helgeland’s screenplay is highly plastic and operatic, making the film feel as if it’s continually ending, or the working-class are perpetually positioned at that moment just before a Hollywood blockbuster resolves itself, always in the third act of their lives. Sean Penn, in particular, takes up the cue with aplomb – his voice drips and quivers like a piece of raw meat, flexing its emotional muscles in a natural sequel to I Am Sam – and most of the cast follow suit, until it’s a bit like watching a roster of A-list actors speaking through their jowels, wearing their hearts on their sleeve like they’ve got severe heart envy. That’s quite at odds with Eastwood’s clipped, efficient directorial style, making it possibly the only film he’s directed that it’s impossible to imagine him actually starring in – the script is so juicy that it doesn’t leave much room for his leanness, and, in some ways, would perhaps work better as a play, something that couldn’t be said about any other Eastwood film. If there is any precedent, it’s in the supernatural fringes of some of his early Westerns – and so his presence can be perhaps felt best in the silence that lurks around the fringes of this film, so startling in its contrast to the high baroque dialogue that it’s virtually supernatural. For all its verbosity, the story is in fact driven by a series of absences and silences – every histrionic, Affleckesque Boston accent has its hushed counterpart – to the point where it feels like silence, or being silenced, is precisely what these people are trying to repress. And it’s at that point that the film really comes into its own, really feels like an Eastwood joint, as he extracts a deep, mystical hush from the river that runs through every relationship – a snaking, crystalline, palpable silence, less white noise than blue noise, generated by a camera that feels more uncannily present than in any of Eastwood’s other films, as it glides across dark waters, resisting the characters as much as it revels in them. As a director of silence, then, Eastwood was paradoxically the best person to adapt the story, or to draw out its hidden traumas – by the end, it feels as if the voices have been lit as unflatteringly as the faces, as Eastwood opens up the pores of the voice to a silence you feel before you hear, a melodrama and mysticism that’s all his own.