2004 Oscar Dialogue: Mystic River

Stephen Himes | Direct, But Not Over-Directed

Clint Eastwood has a refreshingly old-fashioned manner with the camera. Too often, filmmakers "over-direct" movies, jostling the camera to and fro, editing the movie so much that the emotion is chopped up into little bits — take Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams, for example. Eastwood's movies are very calm and observant. He lets what's in front of the camera do the work. Now, when there's not much there, in the way of story or design, the result is tedium like Blood Work. But when Eastwood tackles good material, he has a way of letting the story unfold so naturally that we forget we're watching a movie — in the same way an author with an unself-conscious voice makes you forget that you're reading a book. Here, he lets his production design work subtly in the background to create industrial depression without thrusting smokestacks and abandoned cars in our face to say, "Hey, this place is soooo depressing."

James Norton | Agreed, the Cinematography is Nice. Too Bad the Movie's a Dud.

You've led with an oblique point, and now I'm off balance. I was ready for you to start broad, and argue that Mystic River was one of the most passionate and artistically pure films of 2003; instead, you've served up a heartfelt tribute to Eastwood's talent with images.

I'll even take your commentary one step further, and say that in addition to being a wizard with the camera, Eastwood has made some truly well-rounded, firing-on-all-cylinders great movies. Unforgiven may be one of the best films ever made, particularly when viewed as an acidic commentary on Eastwood's own catalog of diverting, popcorn-munchingly violent Westerns.

The thing is, Mystic River failed. What boggled critics — and what may well boggle the Academy — is that Mystic River is much less than the sum of its parts.

Sure, it had some subtle, pretty shots. It had some powerful performances by A-list actors. It had a deeply respected director with artistic integrity. It had a thoughtful storyline that works — in the abstract — for film aficionados and casual moviegoers.

Ultimately, however, movies come down to their stories and characters. And by adopting one of the worst endings since the theatrical cut of Blade Runner, Mystic River pissed in its own creative drinking water and turned a strong (if flawed) film into a flaming wreck.

Where does the crazy, controlling, "You can rule this city!" character of Sean Penn's wife come from? She was absent for the entire movie, only to pop out of the closet 15 minutes from the end. Where did the disorienting parade sequence come from? How did we suddenly find ourselves watching outtakes from Godfather II?

When I read critics I respect — like David Denby and David Edelstein — praising Mystic River to the skies, I think, "Did I miss something?"

And then I remember the Boston crowd that I watched this film with. At the end of the film, they left the theater confused, disappointed — and genuinely ticked off.

Stephen Himes | Macbeth By Way of Ray Bradbury

Well, since we're going to play the "everybody else in my audience felt this way" card, I guess I have to bow to this much more highly sophisticated Bostonian crowd. For us in the Ozarks, a particularly well-produced Benny Hinn faith healing qualifies as high drama. But I thank you for the concessions on Eastwood's direction. I would only add that those who think Clint just plops the camera down are missing his subtle touches. The trick for the director is to get what he needs in those first shots. Consider a scene with Sean Penn being questioned and consoled at the police station by Kevin Bacon and Laurence Fishburne. Penn's daughter has just been found dead, and Penn hunches over a table like he's been shot in the gut; his shoulders, though, remain stiff — when the conversation turns contentious, Penn is poised immediately for a fight. In the next scene, Fishburne tells Bacon that he knew right away that Penn had done time: "He lost his daughter — that settles in the stomach. But prison is all in the shoulders. I can see it in a man immediately, and it's something that never goes away." The interplay between acting and script takes on more layers in retrospect — all due to Clint Eastwood's invisible hand guiding the narrative without fancy camera tricks, just using actors as a canvas.

So it seems that our conflict arises because of the ending. Laura Linney's desperate cajoling of Sean Penn does seem to come out of nowhere, but it makes sense in a deeper, more subtle way. She existed primarily in the background of the film, as she did in his life. We see glimpses of her, bits of character, and I wondered why she was even with him to begin with. Why does she put up with this? She knows what kind of man he is. And then in the end all that pent-up energy, that emotional repression comes barreling out in a shocking Lady Macbeth moment. This is a man who just killed an old friend, now reduced to having his manhood questioned by his wife.

The same dramatic disorientation is at work in the parade scene. The parade's backdrop of industrial depression is an image of all the repressed issues of these men being played out, finally, in the real world. We see that the thug life Penn's character led was a show, a masking of his internal issues bred on the mean streets of Boston. So yes, the parade is a disorienting image. It's supposed to be — it might be what Ray Bradbury would have done with the story had he been from north Boston and not small-town Illinois.

I think it's in this disorientating final 15 minutes that Eastwood's subtle touch is missed. The rest of the film, as has been noted, is minimalist; we're sold on the idea that we're just observing what's going on. But after the murder, everything changes — as it is bound to do after committing murder. And so the film slips subtly into a bit of abstraction; Penn's world turns upside down, and the audience's perception of this change is enhanced by Eastwood's increased use of the camera for cinematic voice. The ending is perhaps a little too neat, what with the handprints and all, but it's not a disaster. But then again, I'm agreeing with David Denby, and he's addicted to Internet porn, so what do I know?

James Norton | Lost in Translation

Re: Denby — I still think the guy's a great critic, although I blanched when he recently compared the beginning of 21 Grams to the Flash intro for www.buttslutzgonutz.com. I mean, hey. You're writing for the New Yorker. Have some respect.

Anyway, it's funny that you lead off your note with admiration for the "prison is all in the shoulders" scene. That's the sort of thing you either buy, or you don't. I didn't buy it. It's cinematic when someone says, "Oh, I can always tell x by looking at y," but it's also a cliché. Wilderness trackers are always saying it about bent blades of grass.

That said, the prison/shoulder scene isn't really that big of a deal — to you, it's evidence of an enlightened artist/craftsman overseeing the whole project. To me, it's a minor fumble.

But here's a major fumble that I'd like to see you account for: the Sean-Penn-as-Jesus imagery.

You saw it when he walked along the street, his arms spread wide. And you sure as hell saw it when he stood in the window of his bedroom, looking about as Christ-y as you can get without wearing a literal crown of thorns. And there was even a crucifix tattoo to help you decipher the challenging symbolism, in case you'd recently come down with a bad case of mercury poisoning.

In a college film class, he would've been marked down for this. "Good cinematography, but ... the Christ imagery felt really forced and obvious. You're going for the easy points. Raise your sights a little."

And in the professional world … whaaaa-aaat? There were audible groans in the audience (yes, my dear Boston audience, my moral club against this malconstructed cinematic project) when Penn did his Christ shtick for the second time. It's cheesier than cheddar and feels unnecessary; there's already enough going on in this movie without adding a page from the textbook of "Heavy Imagery 101: Crosses, Phalluses and You."

Back to the ending, however, because that's an even more important question.

You explain the rampant Lady Macbethery as a natural revelation bubbling forth to the surface of the film's black muck of moral confusion and wounded souls.

Here's how I would explain it:

Eastwood was trying to catch up with the book, which undoubtedly gives Penn's wife a lot more time and space to explain herself, and to be understood as a fully realized character. He probably shot two or three other scenes that foreshadowed or directly implied her relationship with her husband and her role in the complicated moral ballet of the movie.

But they got cut because the film was already overstuffed, and so we're left with a bizarre outburst that just adds a pile of extra complexity and tension to a situation that's already tense and complicated.

The result? Self-satire. The film is suddenly so dark ("Hey! Let's have intercourse because our dead daughter would have wanted us to!") and complicated that it goes from being a haunting, delicately balanced, reeling pile of emotion and history to being actively funny.

Eastwood took one big step too far.

There are unfortunate shadows of the book elsewhere in the film as well. A friend today today brought up the origin of the Tim Robbins "vampire" monologue. Apparently, in the book, there's a very clear division in the adult Tim Robbins character between his little boy persona, and his big nasty wolf protector persona.

In retrospect, the split is obvious — we can watch Robbins shift between them from scene to scene, or even within scenes (as he confronts Penn just before he's killed near the river, for example).

But I certainly didn't pick up on that explicit division of personae while watching the film, and neither did my two co-viewers. It was there, but it was muddy and unclear. Is it our fault as viewers for not getting it? You can absolutely make that argument. But I'd argue that Eastwood flubbed the book-to-movie transition in yet another key way. Too obvious with the Christ, too subtle with the Robbins-as-werewolf.

(The vampire thing felt like a red herring in this regard; it's much more of a werewolf split than a transformation into a purely evil, inhuman vampire.)

Eastwood just didn't have a masterful grip on this material.

In addition: What was that playful gun hand-gesture that Bacon flashed to Penn at the end, during the parade sequence? "You crazy scamp! You killed our friend, but I think that's cool!"

Or am I reading it wrong? What was Eastwood thinking?

Fair enough about the Penn crucifixion. Though, as far as bad pop movie crucifixions go, I mean, Bruckheimer and Bay crucified Josh Hartnett not once, but twice in Pearl Harbor — and he didn't just die for Ben Affleck, but for the entire Greatest Generation! Yes, the symbolism was a little forced, but I think it's a minor offense. Hell, once a week John Ashcroft comes on Springfield, Mo., television to remind us that every time he loses an election, God resurrects his political career … as if he's on a divine mission to transform American politics. That's offensive crucifixion symbolism. Sean Penn's tattoo? Yeah, Eastwood could have done better, but it doesn't submarine the whole movie, does it?

Maybe it does, considering that I created not one, but two red herrings to skirt the point.

I haven't read the book, so I'm operating at a purely conjectural level, but I think I've got a good enough grasp of the material to be pretty close. When the DVD comes out, we'll probably see those scenes where Laura Linney acts the hell out the script. But let me fall back on my old standby François Truffaut, who famously said that film is about what happens between people, whereas literature is about what happens inside of people. Film has shown a knack for developing secondary characters that the modern novel typically shorthands in a couple pages. Here, had we gotten those other three scenes, the blow-up would have been completely telegraphed. In prose, the author has the advantage of internal dialogue to develop this relationship as subtly as he desires and pull the reader to this point. The director doesn't have this luxury. Had those three scenes been in the movie, with a close-up of Linney's "I don't trust him" look, we probably would have said, "Oh, come on Clint! We get it, OK? That's as obvious as the freakin' crucifixion!"

Film's internal dialogue is played out on the eyes and the face. I have in my notes, "Linney doesn't trust him …." Those few scenes she did have were fraught with enough trepidation, enough uncertainty that you could feel that something wasn't right. Or are we supposed to believe that Linney's character completely trusted and accepted her husband who had spent time in the slammer? That she had never witnessed a violent outburst of his? That she didn't know what was going on when the bald thug buddies showed up? That she was with him solely because he's a nice guy with a great sense of humor? That there was no ambition in her toleration? It's all there in her eyes, in the way she carries herself, in the way that she asks him questions. Or at least I think it is — that's what I wrote down, anyway. Good thing they re-released this bad boy back into theaters, huh? And this time, I'll see if I can't pick up on the Christ symbolism too.

As far as the werewolf thing goes: As soon as they bring that image up, you gotta start looking for the dichotomy, don't you? I mean, why else would it even be there? Again, in retrospect, it's all there. That's the sign of good moviemaking, I think: Upon further reading, things come much more clearly into focus. As for the vampire red herring, that's where the "priests" come into play. They suck the, uh, blood from the innocent, creating the dichotomized werewolves. Isn't that what that was about, as far as the imagery narrarating his personality construct?

Like you said, that's all very subtly done. Even better about Eastwood's direction, it's so deliberate and absent of directorial hystrionics that the audience has time to "read" the film — we're given the space and the quiet to calculate those things. That's what makes a movie that's so externally quiet as Mystic River is so internally exhilarating. Eastwood displays a real grasp of the reader-writer relationship, and his best movies honor that. Now, with Blood Work, where there wasn't much for the reading (c'mon Clint … will his "heart" hold out?), the effect is boredom. But here, when you've got Tim Robbins playing a molestation victim as a metaphorical werewolf, that's great stuff. Are you sure you're not just "hung up" on the obvious crucifixton stuff? Will I use that same bad joke when I review The Passion of the Christ? You never know ….

James Norton | Has the Jury Reached a Verdict?

I'm not trying to cite the silly Penn crucifixion as the worst cinematic blunder to be perpetrated since the "gobble gobble" monologue in Gigli.

I'm just saying that it's a hallmark of why Mystic River is merely good (or "flawed") as opposed to great. It's one of a number of fairly serious errors that most critics chose not to spot, because they were too busy celebrating a high-minded offering from the Great Eastwood.

I admire — no, greatly admire — your eagle eyes re: Linney's subtleties. But even though you knew she's with this hardass ex-con for reasons other than rosy-ribboned true love, weren't you just a bit confused when she emerged, at the very end of the film and to little real purpose, as a crazy, controlling, power-hungry wench?

You're probably right — some of this was quietly implied. But I make my stand against this film on the grounds that its basic craft is faulty. Eastwood muffed some things that could have been fixed with just one more good editing session and a little more willingness to diverge from the text of the novel.

Re: Vampires and werewolves — I'm going to concede ground on this one. You're right. The symbolism was up there, and I was blaming Eastwood for my own inability to walk through the templates. At the same time — why spread more symbolism and spookiness on top of a film that's already plenty heavy? Are murder, sexual violence, class issues and implied prison brutality insufficient baggage? Do the monster metaphors add clarity and impact, or muddy the waters?

As a guy who paid $8.75 to see a big cloudy gravitas-bomb on a Friday night, my heart is in the latter camp. As a critic, I think you've got a sustainable case that the metaphors add depth and art, though I still would argue he's adding needless tinsel and further tangling an already byzantine narrative.

Overall, however, I'd say Mystic River is a film worth seeing. When Senn Penn charged into that crowd of police to see his murdered daughter's body, I almost cried. That's good, powerful filmmaking. And Tim Robbins' bravura performance defines the word "haunted."

It's been a pleasure hashing all this out with you, Stephen. You're a keen thinker, and you've helped me hone my original scathing opinion down to something a little more carefully reasoned: Should we all rent Mystic River on DVD and have a good long argument about its worth? Absolutely. Should we give it a Best Picture Oscar? Absolutely not.

E-mail Stephen Himes at stephenhimes@hotmail.com.

E-mail James Norton at jrnorton@flakmag.com.

— graphic by D.P. Barsam (barsam@hotpop.com)