Mystic River

Let's switch Eastwood gears to strictly behind the camera. The one thing Clint is good at is picking and writing and directing Oscar contenders year in and year out. His track record is near impeccable. This is one of those movies that I thought back to when I saw Gone Baby Gone and The Town. It's that Boston Hard core street movie. It also won Sean Penn an a very well deserved Oscar as a grieving Father. The movie surrounds three subjects. Life long friends that have grown apart. The Death of one of their Daughters. And the betrayal one of them has harbored for forty years against the other two. Let's start at the top. The friends are Jimmy (Penn), Dave (Robbins), and Sean (Bacon.) Dave has some serious angst against the other two, but I won't spoil it, or its subject matter. As for Jimmy and Sean, they went in opposite directions professionally. Sean is a Detective, and Jimmy is a shop owner up front, but a peddler thug type as well. One day Jimmy's daughter's is murdered in his neighborhood and Jimmy is the type to take it all the way til he gets his revenge. He loved his Daughter as only a Father could, and to have her ripped away at the young age of 16 is almost too much for him to handle. After the funeral he starts pressing. He sends his goons out for info, gathers his own theories, starts cracking skulls, and no matter how much Sean tells him to let the police handle it....well, that just isn't good enough. He starts where any Father would. The boyfriend. In this case, it's a fellow 16 year old local boy named Brendan Harris (Tom Guiry, which for those who don't realize, = Smalls from The Sandlot). The relationship was a secret because of how protective Jimmy was and the fact that he had an up front distaste for the boy's absent Father. It seems like Sean is too close to this and won't tell his old pal to lay off. The voice of reason is Whitey Powers (Fishburne), Sean's partner. He knows something is going on, not only with the murder, but the Jimmy, Sean, Dave situation. Dave is a little messed up, to say the least. He has issues stemming from childhood and kinda lurches around, head down, keeping to himself. It's one hell of a detective story with one of the absolute unforeseen best endings I have ever seen. I push this movie to anyone who hasn't seen it. A-Bomb has had my copy for a little over a year, and maybe...just maybe this will get him to put it in. I know one thing. I'll be there. The only thing that makes me nervous is how I will take it this time around. Every time I ever watched it, I had no kids and no Fatherly emotions. Now, not so much. I do have a girl, and I understand all the more where Jimmy is coming from in this film.

NBM rates Mystic River - Phenomenal

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