MYSTIC RIVER (2003) C widescreen 137m dir: Clint Eastwood

w/Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne, Marcia Gay Harden, Laura Linney, Kevin Chapman, Tom Guiry, Emmy Rossum, Spencer Treat Clark, Andrew Mackin, Adam Nelson, Robert Wahlberg, Jenny O'Hara, John Doman

From a review by Andrew Sarris in The New York Observer: "Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, from a screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane, has turned out to be a more-than-worthy choice to open the 41st New York Film Festival, and I must say, as an involved witness to the first New York Film Festival back in 1963, I've ceased to be amazed that the festival has survived all its legions of detractors to keep coming back year after year, stronger and more popular than ever. Indeed, as one of its beleaguered journalistic defenders in 1963, I never expected it to come back for a second year, much less a 41st.

"As faithful as Messrs. Eastwood and Helgeland have been to Mr. Lehane's deep feelings for family ties-in particular the helplessly wild love of fathers for daughters, and the numbing guilt of husbands toward wives-the film does not underline its message as insistently as the book does. Since excessive underlining has occasionally marred Mr. Eastwood's most impressive previous works, Mystic River must be considered a decisive advance for the director toward complete artistic mastery of his narrative material. Still, the movie retains the essence of the book in demonstrating that just as all politics is local, all tragedy is familial. The linked destinies of Jimmy Markum (Sean Penn), Dave Boyle (Tim Robbins) and Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon) are forever clouded by an evil act inflicted during their otherwise uneventful childhoods. When l1-year-old Dave is taken away in a car by a pair of shrewdly calculating adult predators pretending to be police detectives, Jimmy and Sean can only look on helplessly, setting the stage for their lifelong regret over 'dropping' Dave from their intimate circle after his traumatic misadventure. At this point, Mr. Eastwood and Mr. Helgeland leap forward 25 years to the respective adulthoods of the three co-protagonists, without dwelling on the book's description of a whole community turning its back puritanically on Dave as 'damaged goods.' We then learn (more indirectly in the film than in the book) that Jimmy has served a short prison term for a series of robberies before becoming the respectable owner of a grocery store. Sean has become a detective with the Massachusetts State Police, and Dave has barely moved on from his humble origins as a low-paid laborer. Jimmy has been widowed and subsequently remarried and has one 19-year-old daughter, Katie Markum (Emmy Rossum), from his late first wife and two little girls from his second, Annabeth (Laura Linney). Sean has been separated from his wife and little girl, and Dave is in the midst of a shaky marriage with a neurotic partner, Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden). When Katie is brutally murdered, Jimmy goes berserk with grief and vows his own personal revenge against his daughter's killer. As Sean and his African-American partner, jokingly named 'Whitey' Powers (Laurence Fishburne), begin their investigation. Sean soon realizes that Jimmy and his former gang members may impede the investigation with their vigilante tactics. To make matters more complicated, Dave accidentally becomes a suspect in Kate's murder after getting involved in an unrelated violent incident-unrelated, that is, to Katie's murder, but very much related to the horrible crime inflicted upon him when he was a child. Unfortunately for Dave, the incident has left his hands bloodied, arousing the wife's suspicions. Ironies abound as fatal coincidences and rampant hysteria combine to create a murderous misunderstanding, binding three erstwhile playmates to the moral and emotional consequences of a hot-blooded homicidal ceremony. The acting is uniformly inspired, and deftly balances the bereft primal outbursts of Mr. Penn's Jimmy and the emotionally disconnected depression of Mr. Robbins' Dave at one extreme, and the cool, methodical procedures of Mr. Bacon's and Mr. Fishburne's dogged detectives on the other. In this mostly male maelstrom, Ms. Linney's Annabeth erupts in one transcendent Trojan Women –like scene in which she exalts her guilt-ridden husband Jimmy as a warrior king from the Celtic mists of blue-collar Boston's immigrant past-a time when men of iron drew their metaphorical swords on anyone menacing their wives and daughters. Yet the testosterone level never reaches the heights of self-worshipping Schwarzeneggerian rapture. Mr. Eastwood keeps a lid on all the masculine fury by opening many scenes with overhead helicopter shots, pinning the characters down to their sociological surroundings, as well as making them submit to the caprices of a cosmic fate. Like most of the more interesting films this year, Mystic River displays a darker view of our existence in the new millennium than was the norm in the old Hollywood dream factories. Mr. Eastwood is to be commended for reportedly insisting that the film be shot in its natural Boston habitat rather than in a cheaper approximation of Boston, such as bargain-basement Toronto. This emphasis on geographical authenticity helps make this film a masterpiece of the first order."