Make way for the white elephant: Clint Eastwood's latest directorial effort, Mystic River, lumbers into theaters today. In his seminal essay "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" (1962), the great, maverick art critic Manny Farber broke art down into two categories. Lazy and unimaginative, "White Elephant" art sticks to tired convention and inflated shorthand technique in constructing constrained, self-important masterpieces. In contrast, "Termite" art--"niggling, omnivorous, ambitionless"--reflects a smaller, more personal vision and involves us through its constant, creative "nibbling" away at convention. Unfortunately, Mystic River resembles the former creature, the pale pachyderm.
Adapted from Dennis Lehane's acclaimed mystery novel, the film centers on the interconnected lives of three boyhood friends. Back in the 1970's, one of the boys was abducted by a pedophile while the other two looked on, but now, flash-forward to the present, the events surrounding the troubled police investigation of a 19-year-old girl's murder become our focus. Sean Penn plays swaggering ex-con Jimmy Markum, a happily married neighborhood convenience-store owner and the volatile father of the victim; Tim Robbins is Dave Boyle, the still-traumatized boyhood rape victim, now a family man; and Kevin Bacon is Sean Devine, the workaholic police detective leading the search for the girl's killer.
From its fateful prologue to its bleak, revelatory final reel, Mystic River strives palpably for a tone of devastating gravitas. Profound issues of justice and community collide with a dense sludge of hate, betrayal, grief, and distrust, and it all coalesces into impassioned comments on the hollowness of macho posturing and vengeance, on the tragic way in which the past ineluctably weighs on the present. But at certain points, again and again throughout the film, these grand themes push past affecting illustration into an exasperatingly affected, grandiose realm of hollow rhetoric. Nicely observed moments arise organically out of scenes only to be suffocated under the stylistic bloat of some simplistic notion of "prestige."
This is all the more dispiriting--not to mention ironic--when one considers how perfectly Mystic River's chief concern--the intersection of masculinity, morality, and violence in society--aligns with Eastwood's own pet themes throughout his career. Eastwood was born to direct this movie. So what spurred him to direct the film in a style so inimical to his past tendencies, strengths, and successes? While, of late, he has cranked out a string of relatively uninspired genre works (though not without their charms), Eastwood had a remarkable run of masterpieces and near-masterpieces from the late 1980's to mid 1990's. All but Unforgiven (1992)--still his best--remain shamefully overlooked.
Bird (1988), White Hunter, Black Heart (1990), A Perfect World (1993), and The Bridges of Madison County (1995) unambiguously evidence a distinctive, Termite-art sensibility. Modest and unembellished, they achieved a genuine poignancy and meaning through the understated power of accumulated moments and details. Scenes might build towards dramatic, explosive set pieces--the farmhouse standoff in A Perfect World, the overwhelmingly plangent rainstorm parting of the lovers in The Bridges of Madison County--but they were always patiently established and earned. Other climaxes--Charlie Parker's death in Bird, the final track-in on Eastwood's face in White Hunter, Black Heart--derived their power almost wholly from eloquent restraint.
In Mystic River, however, Eastwood doesn't know when to quit. A promising four-note musical motif is introduced then promptly run into the ground. Jimmy's anguished discovery of his daughter's death, an already intense scene, ends gracelessly with a heavy-handed overhead pan up to the sky. More damagingly, Penn and Robbins, in overkill mode, lay on excessive gestures and too-telling grimaces. Though, to be fair, probably no actor could pull off scenes like the bedtime-story and vampire-movie monologues that Robbins is saddled with--two examples of poor writing that awkwardly articulate what should have been left unspoken.
For all my major and minor gripes about Mystic River, though, there's also a good deal the film does well. Typical of Eastwood's movies, but particularly apparent here, is the strong sense of place, owing to extensive location shooting; the film's Irish-Catholic, blue-collar Boston neighborhood milieu is vividly conveyed. Surpassingly dark, shadowy cinematography, drained of bright color, captures a suitably somber landscape of steel blue, crimson, grey, and deep green. Eastwood's usual languid pacing is still refreshingly old-fashioned, and he again revivifies otherwise workmanlike police procedural material with his knack for infusing an easy-going rapport into his detective characters. And while the big names falter, the film's supporting performances are accomplished, none more so than 21-year-old Tom Guiry as the heartbroken secret boyfriend of the murdered girl.
In the end, Eastwood will remain, in his waning years, among the treasures of American cinema, but sadly, the film now billed as his ambitious artistic comeback is frankly not, and his truly great works have yet to be fully appreciated.