Mystic River--A Review

Two of the five nominees for Best Picture in 2003 were movies that brooded--Mystic River and Lost in Translation. Both emphasize the stark loneliness of the modern condition, loneliness that can either result from memories of childhood trauma (Mystic) or from the meaninglessness of the present (Translation). Confronted with such raw and painful reactions to the dissonance of modern life, the Academy decided to escape to fantasy and award Lord of the Rings the garland for Best Picture. But today, nearly 4 1/2 years after this melancholic Boston-based emotionally-draining film made its appearance, its somber appeal and penetrating grief continue to haunt a viewer, even on a second viewing. The thing that stayed with me the longest after watching it again last night was the different reactions to the past of at least three of its characters. Somewhere among these reactions is where we tend to live. This essay explores how the past "plays" with us, even as we live our lives apparently in the freedom of the present.

A Brief Synopsis

The nub of the picture is how three adult characters, who were once boyhood friends, handle memories of the trauma suffered by one of the boys, Dave Boyle (played by Tim Robbins), who was abducted by pedophiles while the other two stood helplessly looking on. To be more precise, what haunts all these characters (also Jimmy Markum, played by Sean Penn and Sean Devine, played by Kevin Bacon) is the fact that, as one says later, "we were all in the car with you" (Dave) as it drove away. Dave was abused for four days until he escaped to safety. But no one, in fact, can escape from the psychological trauma of the event.

Fast forward 30 years (the film says "25," but in fact the three actors were all born in 1958 and 1960, making them 43-45 when the film was shot, and the boys were no older than about 12 or 13 in the film's opening scene). Each of the three has gone his own way: Sean is a hard-driving homicide detective for the MA State Police; Jimmy, who has served a term in prison for robbery, runs a local store in his old neighborhood; and Dave, who is married with a son and still lives in the same neighborhood, has been unable to connect with life because of the haunting reality of his past. He is really a shattered hulk of humanity, existing but not living. They live rather separate lives, despite the fact that Dave is married to a cousin of Sean's second wife (his first wife died of cancer while he was in prison), but they are brought together by the murder of Jimmy's oldest daughter, a precocious 19 year-old, who was planning to escape to Las Vegas with her secret boyfriend Brendan and begin a life with him there. It is the murder of Jimmy's daughter that serves as the catalyst to open/re-open the chief characters' psyches, and director Clint Eastwood does so with insight and care. One might define a very good movie as one that you can't get out of your mind even as you see its stark flaws. That is certainly the case here.

Instead of recounting some of the other scenes of the movie (just read the Wikipedia article on it), I will focus for the rest of the essay on how each of three characters views the past.

The Past As Immobilizing Us in the Present

Dave Boyle is not simply haunted by his past; he is possessed by it, immobilized by it, overmastered by it. The trauma of abduction and brutal raping by pedophiles over a four-day period in his youth has become so etched on his face and demeanor that he has, as it were, stopped living. He has a son, with whom he plays whiffleball and whom he walks to school, but any semblance of a life of joy, meaning, satisfaction in the present is gone. Today's life has been taken away from him because of yesterday's abuse. On one occasion his ghostly wife Celeste walks in on him watching Vampire movies in the middle of the night; he identifies with their "undead" situation.

Jimmy Markum has a different relationship to the past. Though he watched his friend get into the car driven by the pedophiles, he seems to be hounded by other things from his past. Jimmy lived the life of a small-time burgler, being arrested on more than one occasion. A partner in crime ratted on him (Jimmy later killed him), resulting in Jimmy's sojourn in a state prison for two years. But while he was in prison his first wife developed cancer and died, and he wasn't there for his daughter. When she is murdered at age 19, tremendous feelings of guilt overwhelm Jimmy. While Dave is immobilized by the past, Jimmy can't get by the guilt that the past brings. We don't know how much guilt he still feels about Dave's abduction (is this a directorial flaw?), but he just knows that he has done something fatally wrong that led inexorably to his daughter's murder. His rage and guilt lead him to conduct his "parallel investigation" of his daughter's murder, and ultimately he murders the man (Dave Boyle) whom he thinks is responsible for the crime. When he learns later from his other childhood friend, Sean Devine, that another has confessed to the murder, Jimmy now has another guilt-inducing event on his mind.

Finally, Jimmy's wife Annabeth (played by Laura Linney) has one chilling speech near the end of the film that discloses her relationship to the past. As Jimmy is looking forlornly out the window on the day of a town parade, overwhelmed by the guilt of having murdered Dave, she approaches him and tells him how a "King," like Jimmy is, just has to do the work before him. He has to protect his family, which consists of Annabeth and two small girls. He has to look to the future and, basically, forget the past. The past is over and gone. After having sex with his wife, then, they all go down to the parade and lose themselves in the anonymity of the event.

Conclusion--Us and Our Past(s)

Though Eastwood hasn't given us the full panoply of how people might relate to the past (in this regard, he might have developed Kevin Bacon's character more fully, perhaps as a person who has successfully negotiated some of the hurdles of the past or, alternatively, as a person who has been scarred in a different way. Perhaps Bacon/Devine might recall the past as a lesson, and seek to "get the bad guys" as a result), these three "takes" on how the past "plays" with us are noteworthy. I, for one, have heard or met people in all three relationships with their past. Which is it for you?

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