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| When they were kids growing up together in a rough section of Boston, Jimmy, Dave and Sean spent their days playing stickball on the street. Twenty-five years later, the three find themselves thrust back together by another life altering event - the murder of Jimmy's 19-year-old daughter. |
(2003) Film Review by Darrel Manson |
| This page was created on October 8, 2003
This page was last updated on
December 11, 2004
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| CREDITS |
|  Directed by Clint Eastwood
Novel by Dennis Lehane
Screenplay by Brian Helgeland
Cast (in credits order)
Sean Penn .... Jimmy
Tim Robbins .... Dave
Kevin Bacon .... Sean
Laurence Fishburne .... Whitey
Marcia Gay Harden .... Celeste Boyle
Kevin Chapman .... Val Savage
Laura Linney .... Annabeth Markum
Adam Nelson .... Nick Savage
Emmy Rossum .... Katie
Cameron Bowen .... Young Dave
rest of cast listed alphabetically
Matty Blake .... State Trooper
Andrew Blesser .... Sibling
Douglass Bowen Flynn .... Cop at Barricade
Cayden Boyd .... Michael
Produced by
Bruce Berman .... executive producer
Clint Eastwood .... producer
Judie Hoyt .... producer
Robert Lorenz .... producer
Original Music by Clint Eastwood and Lennie Niehaus
Cinematography by Tom Stern
Film Editing by Joel Cox
MPAA: Rated R for language and violence.
Runtime: 137 min / France:137 min (Cannes Film Festival)
For rating reasons, go to FILMRATINGS.COM, and MPAA.ORG.
Parents, please refer to PARENTALGUIDE.ORG |
| TRAILERS AND CLIPS |
| —Trailers |
| CD |
Mystic River
[Soundtrack]
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| BOOK |
Mystic River : A Novel
by Dennis Lehane (Author)
Ever since blasting onto the literary scene with the Shamus Award-winning A Drink Before the War, Dennis Lehane has been the golden boy of noir. His Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro novels are marvels of tight pacing, dialogue so good it gets under your skin and stays there, with dead-on portrayals of working-class Boston neighborhoods. Sure, he's the oft-proclaimed, hard-boiled heir to Hammett and Chandler, but Lehane also takes a page from the Hemingway school of hyper-intense writing.
He pares away and pares away until he's left with the absolute essentials--and then those essentials just explode off the page. In his five Kenzie-Gennaro novels, the detective duo is at the nexus of Lehane's big bang. Darkly funny and just this side of jaded, Angie and Patrick move through Dorchester's bleak streets with an assurance born of familiarity. It's impossible to imagine these streets without the pair, or
to imagine the pair away from those streets. Mystic River, then, arrives as a bit of a gamble, as Lehane moves from the sharp edges of portraiture to the broader strokes of landscape. No Angie, no Patrick: this neighborhood is on its own. It's not any prettier and certainly no friendlier, and its working-class façade still barely masks the irresistible tug of violent ways, means, and ends.
Twenty-five years ago, Dave Boyle got into a car. When he came back four days later, he was different in a way that destroyed his friendship with Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus. Now Sean's a cop, Jimmy's a store owner with a prison record and mob connections, and Dave's trying hard to keep his demons safely submerged. When Jimmy's daughter Katie is found murdered, each of the men must confront a past that none is eager to acknowledge.
Lehane tugs delicately on the strands that weave this neighborhood together, testing for their strengths and weaknesses; this novel seems as much anthropological case study as thriller.
By turns violent and pensive, Mystic River is vintage Lehane. How good is it? You may go in missing Angie and Patrick, but after a few pages you won't even realize they're gone. Lehane's noir is still black magic. --Kelly Flynn
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| POSTER |
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Mystic River
27 in x 40 in
Double-sided poster plain, or
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| SYNOPSIS |
| When they were kids growing up together in a rough section of Boston, Jimmy Markum (SEAN PENN), Dave Boyle (TIM ROBBINS) and Sean Devine (KEVIN BACON) spent their days playing stickball on the street, the way most boys did in their blue-collar neighborhood of East Buckingham. Nothing much ever happened in their neighborhood. That is, until Dave was forced to take the ride that would change all of their lives forever.
 Twenty-five years later, the three find themselves thrust back together by another life altering event - the murder of Jimmy's 19-year-old daughter. Now a cop, Sean is assigned to the case and he and his partner (LAURENCE FISHBURNE) are charged with unraveling the seemingly
senseless crime. They must also stay one step ahead of Jimmy, a man driven by an all consuming rage to find his daughter's killer.
Connected to the crime by a series of circumstances, Dave is forced to confront the demons of his own past. Demons that threaten to destroy his marriage and any hope he may have for a future. As the investigation tightens around these three friends, an ominous story unfolds that revolves around friendship, family and innocence lost too soon.
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Review
by DARREL MANSON BLOG
Pastor, Artesia Christian Church, Artesia, CA
http://netministries.org/see/churches/ch01198
Darrel has an incredible love and interest in the cinematic arts. His reviews usually include independent and significantly important film. |
 Jimmy, Sean and Dave were friends growing up in South Boston. One day as they were playing and making mischief, Dave was abducted, held and abused for four days. It could have been any of the three, but Dave was the unlucky one.
They grew up. Dave, the victim, became a barely functioning adult. Jimmy grew into a minor criminal. Sean becomes a state police detective. They are all still in the same neighborhood, but their paths rarely cross, until Jimmy's daughter is murdered and Sean is the officer investigating the death. Jimmy uses his underworld connections to try to find the killer himself. Both investigations begin to point to Dave.
Mystic River has wonderful performances, especially by Sean Penn and Tim Robbins (although the rest of the cast fills in the film very well.) It is an impressive collection of talent that blends well in the telling of the story.
 There are some flaws with the film. Clint Eastwood's score doesn't always work and at times even detracts from the film. A plot line dealing with Sean and his estranged wife is so vague that the viewer has no
idea what is going on. At times that becomes a distraction from the story.
In spite of these flaws, the film overall is a wonderful look into victims, violence and vengeance. All three of the key characters are in some way victims of the abduction of Dave. Dave, of course, is most affected, but each of the other two knows it could just have easily have been him. It is probably one of the factors that leads Jimmy to control things through violence, and Sean to try to save victims through the law.
It seems natural for victims to seek revenge on those who have hurt them. That thirst for retribution becomes the driving force for Jimmy after the death of his daughter. He is determined to find and deal with whomever is responsible. In the end, however, his rush to judgment turns out to be too quick, and the wrong person is punished.
In the aftermath of September 11, many Americans, filled with anger, fear and grief, rushed to judgment in their own seeking of vengeance for the atrocities. Muslims were targeted for hatred and violence. In Artesia, where I pastor a church, Sikhs were attacked on the street because their turbans made some mistake them for Arab. Even people with a vague Middle Eastern appearance or who didn't speak English suffered rejection or violence.
In response to the attacks of September 11, new laws were put into effect and the US has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. For some these options are seen as the appropriate response in a world that must deal seriously with terrorism. Others question if these responses are really dealing with terrorism or are just the reactions of anger and fear that lead people to lash out at convenient targets to satisfy the blood lust that the anger and fear create within us -- both as individuals and
as a society.
 In the film's epilogue, Jimmy's conscience is appropriately strained by what he has done. His wife Annabeth soothes him with a monologue absolving him of guilt because he has done what he has done for the protection and safety of his family. Even if it wasn't right, the motivation of caring for his family makes everything he does acceptable.
In the two years that have followed the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, there have been many responses -- some appropriate, some wrong-headed. When some object to what has been done, the answer often comes back that it is being done for safety -- that as long as it is done for the right reason, there should be no objection raised or guilt assigned.
But we know that often the vengeance and safety we seek -- or even demand -- may not be justice. The harm done in the name of vengeance may well be a new injustice. |
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