Beloved and even venerated by millions for his inarguable contribution to the Western’s golden age, Clint Eastwood’s directorial career has nonetheless been an unfortunate sequence of stones best left unturned. A succession of torpid ‘thrillers’ (Absolute Power, True Crime, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) have wasted both the audience’s time and that of the impressive casts which Eastwood invariably assembles, with even his less coma-inducing output characterised by an insufferably slow pace and a plodding, join-the-dots approach to narrative.
Somehow or other, though, Mystic River cuts it as Eastwood’s most watchable work in years. While still not exactly inclined to take 90 minutes where 137 will do, the combination of a supreme cast and a rich, complex narrative certainly render it more watchable than its run-of-the-mill Hollywood competitors. It’s adapted from Dennis Lehane’s novel of the same name, based around a murder investigation which re-unites three men who met as kids in traumatic circumstances: Jimmy(Sean Penn)’s daughter has just been brutally murdered, cop Sean (Kevin Bacon) is assigned to investigate, and nervy, married loner Dave (Tim Robbins) begins to fall under suspicion.
While the script itself is astonishingly effective considering it came from the pen of Payback scriptwriter and Sin Eater director Brian Helgeland, it’s basically the supercharged performances of Penn and Robbins that lift Mystic River above the sub-ordinary. Women, as is Clint’s wont, are kept well out of the way; Laura Linney and Marcia Gay Harden can just about be noticed in spousal roles if you look hard enough. But a shockingly powerful, if morally dubious, final pay-off comes close to justifying the not inconsiderable running time, and there are passages where Penn looks as haunted as we’ve ever seen him, which won’t disappear from the memory banks in a hurry.
No masterpiece, but Mystic River is easily Clint’s finest hour behind the camera since Unforgiven.