FilmBlather.com

"We bury our sins, Dave. We wash them clean."

Film critics love to categorize things, and we get upset when we can't do so, at least until we remember that great films will defy categorization. I wanted to think of Clint Eastwood's Mystic River as a whodunnit, but then again we know whodunnit, or we think we do; the mystery is why he did it. The movie plays somewhat like a film noir, but it's missing crucial elements of the genre. The plot reminded me of Barry Levinson's 1996 thriller Sleepers (in fact, both films star Kevin Bacon), but Mystic River isn't interested in turning horrible abuse into cheap suspense.

Nothing works. I am so accustomed to inventing "angles" for my reviews that a movie like this threatens to flummox me. It defies all angles and conventional approaches. When you think you've got it pegged, it makes a sudden left turn, and it doesn't make a wrong one until the very end, with a denouement that fails to give the characters the wrap-up they deserve. Maybe leaving the audience satisfied is another rule that Mystic River breaks.

The usually lively "Warner Bros." and "Village Roadshow" logos are changed to appear static and grim in the film's opening frames. The scenes that follow quite justify such an alteration. Three pre-teen boys, in an act of healthy mischief, decide to immortalize their names in a drying block of cement. The first two succeed in making the ground read "Jimmy" and "Sean," but the third is interrupted in the act by a man claiming to be a policeman, who takes him away in a car. His signature remains half-finished, the missing part eventually symbolizing the incompleteness of the adult Dave, terminally traumatized and still haunted by the events that followed that fateful trip in the stranger's vehicle.

With little warning and without any clear signpost, we are transported twenty-some years in the future, where we meet the grown-up Jimmy (Sean Penn), Sean (Kevin Bacon) and Dave (Tim Robbins). Sean has become a successful homicide detective, but his personal life isn't quite as accomplished -- his pregnant wife left him, and has taken to calling him on the phone but saying nothing. Jimmy is a career criminal who recently bought a convenience store and went clean, though his ties to that world remain. Dave has a wife named Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden) and a young son, but he has lately been acting stranger and stranger.

Jimmy's daughter is brutally murdered, apparently right before she was going to elope with a boy whom Jimmy irrationally despised. Sean is called in to investigate. The night of the murder, Dave comes home with blood on his hands, and tells Celeste a story about going crazy on a mugger and bashing his head against the curb. Dave saw Jimmy's daughter dancing atop the local bar that night, and Eastwood purposely allows little room for doubt, making it pretty clear that Dave is the killer. In the end all is not as it seems, but Mystic River is nonetheless not intended to work as a straightforward mystery. It's not a straightforward anything.

The past and present collide thunderously in the events that follow, as each of the three protagonists must reconcile their present obligations and what they witnessed or experienced that day out on the street. We delve, too, into what happened to them between then and now, learn about the people who have entered and left their spheres of influence, get a genuine feel for the course of these people's lives. This is pretty remarkable in itself.

The surprises in the last half are character-based, not plot-driven. Look at the way everything comes together for Jimmy before brutally falling apart again. How interesting that Celeste herself becomes implicated in a murder, and watch how the final scenes tweak her character and shed light on her guilt. And consider that Dave's character arc is completely redefined by what we find out about him, and he becomes infinitely more sympathetic.

But then, something strange. There is a revelation and a lengthy speech by Laura Linney, who plays Jimmy's wife. What she says seems to be the film's way of letting Jimmy off the hook for what he's done, which isn't fair to anyone. Then there's a conversation between him and Sean that rings glaringly false, with the two essentially blaming everything on lost innocence, the film nodding and encouraging them along. The audience and the characters deserved better, I think, but the late inning error barely detracts from the experience of this unusual, haunting film.