(out of 4)

By Sean Chavel

"Mystic River" is about three adult men who remain haunted by demons of the past. Directed by Clint Eastwood, his film is a rare emotional powerhouse achieved by brilliant writing and wrenching performances. The film unfolds at the pace of a dense novel, taking its time establishing scenery, atmosphere and character. Too many heavy and turgid dramas tend to overrun the cineplexes in the fall season, but this is a rare drama worth investing in. It manages to express many human truths about love, hate, fear and anguish.

An extraordinary ensemble cast has come together, many of them delivering performances among their career best. In the center: Jimmy (Sean Penn), as an ex-con who now runs a small grocery, Dave (Tim Robbins), a handyman, and Sean (Kevin Bacon), a homicide detective. They play damaged men of varying degrees who were friends as young boys. One single day in their childhood affected them deeply. Two men in a car drove up, flashed a badge and took one of the boys away with them. The boy was abused inside a darkened cellar for days until he escaped.

In the present, Jimmy is heartbroken by a tragedy – the murder of his nineteen-year old daughter. Sean is the detective assigned to the case and although he’s conflicted about investigating a murder that affects his friend, he proceeds in a professional way. Dave becomes the comforting neighbor that returns unexpectedly into their lives. These men have grown into dissonant and irresolute people, with nothing in common except that now they are all married.

There is an obviously conducted search for the killer of Jimmy’s daughter, but the film builds mystery in other unexpected ways. The three men are handicapped by their own selfish hidden motives and hide behind their own unspoken secrets. Dave, for instance, was in a mortal conflict on the same night as the death of Jimmy’s daughter. In an initial inquiry, he said that he had been mugged and he had fought back, pounding the perpetrator’s head into a sidewalk. Laura Linney plays Jimmy’s wife and Marcia Gay Harden (also in an Oscar-worthy performance) plays Dave’s wife who warm up to each other during these hard times. Linney is strictly devotional to Jimmy, but Harden is the opposite, she grows more doubtful and distrustful towards her husband about his mugger story and more distanced as old wounds resurface.

Penn delivers what is perhaps the best dramatic performance by an actor this year, as a man so grudgingly full of vengeance and hatred in his heart that his fury can’t rest until he finds closure. His character Jimmy assigns neighborhood thugs to conduct their own investigation of his daughter’s death, unleashing them with urgency. Penn’s shoulders are firm and unyielding, his character always in posture of the vindictiveness that overpowers him. He may be a small grocery man, but he has the wrath of a small Corleone in "The Godfather" family.

Robbins plays the man who was abused and permanently damaged in his abduction as a boy. He plays a man harbored by both anger and guilt, in his old age he can no longer contain his temperance. One of the gripping mysteries of the film is the wonder of how he can’t seem to articulate his feelings and provide the crucial explanations when it is essential for him to do so. He is also a man stripped of prudence and good judgment, and this creates distance between him and his wife.

Denial plays a great deal into the life of Bacon’s character. Sure, he’s the less interesting of the three main characters but his back story dilemma is necessary to reinforce the film’s themes. Bacon hurts all the time because of the absence of his estranged wife. She rings his phone and he talks to her, but doesn’t tell her what she needs to hear. Bacon plays a man who doesn’t want to take the responsibility that he possibly pushed his wife away. Bacon, like the other two men, is harbored by the same demons of fear and anguish as them but refuses to admit it. His detective partner, played by Laurence Fishburne, keeps nudging him to consider his childhood friend as a suspect but he refuses to look at that possibility.

Eastwood’s brilliant use of cross-cutting in the climactic scenes is heart-stopping, cutting back and forth between two different scenes of simultaneous action that correlate to each other. There are two different types of suspense happening here: a police procedural to catch the right killer and also the drama of watching grieved men use all the power they have to contain their fleeing, hasty emotions at an integral time that depends on them controlling themselves. The acting is exhilarating and cataclysmic at the same time.

The film is impeccably scripted by Brian Helgeland ("L.A. Confidential") who provides rich and satisfying parts for his large ensemble, also carefully interweaving the suffering and violence with discreet and sophisticated taste. At the end, a couple characters grow stronger from the outcome, a couple plummet to further depths of weakness and one character – not who you would initially expect – is destined to become a crazy old kook. A solution is found in the murder story but the suspense of the film depends on which characters will survive through damages and despair.