With a vengeance...
by Chris Dashiell

Clint Eastwood is from the old school, where a director puts together a good story with solid professionalism. His reliance on conventional narrative devices can make his films uneven. But while making concessions to what he thinks audiences can accept, he allows some remarkable themes and insights to find expression. One of his central concerns is violence, as seductive temptation, as unacknowledged guilt, as the fatal flaw in the American soul.

His latest film, Mystic River, adapted by Brian Helgeland from a Dennis Lehane novel, takes place in a working class Boston neighborhood. In the prologue we see 10-year old Dave abducted by fake cops while his friends Jimmy and Sean look on helplessly. After being repeatedly abused, the boy escapes, but something inside him is damaged for life. Thirty years later, Dave (Tim Robbins) is married with a kid, but still troubled. Jimmy (Sean Penn) is an ex-con and small-time wise guy running a grocery business. Then, one night, somebody murders Jimmy's 19-year-old daughter, and that same night, Dave, who was one of the last to see her alive, comes home with blood on his hands, telling his wife (Marcia Gay Harden) that he was attacked by a mugger and thinks he might have killed him. The third friend, Sean (Kevin Bacon) is a homicide detective assigned to the investigation.

As mystery stories go, the plot is rather simple (I think most reasonably alert viewers will figure it out well before the cops in the movie do). But the impressive thing about Mystic River is the mood. Eastwood creates an atmosphere of dread, and a troubling sense of incongruity between people's "normal" lives and their secret passions. Besides the build-up of tension, which the director is very good at, the film has a way of making you feel what it must be like to have the worst thing you can imagine happen to you. Some interesting use of overhead shots and swirling camerawork accentuates the vertigo.

Sean Penn's performance is fiercely volatile, combining a tough protectiveness with a scary mean streak. His character embodies the shifting boundary between grief and hatred that becomes the main thrust of the film's narrative logic. Tim Robbins is even more impressive - shambling, haunted, intensely inward, he draws a chilling, opaque curtain between us and his character's motivations. Kevin Bacon is stuck with the more standard role of the detective. He does just fine, and so does Laurence Fishburne as his partner, but in their scenes of brainstorming and investigation we're on much more familiar ground.

Eastwood avoids the expected closure, letting the deeper meanings stay intriguingly open-ended. His depiction of criminal complicity as an everyday affair is brave, if a bit problematic. I don't think the story sufficiently prepares us for it. In addition, the character of Jimmy's wife, played by Laura Linney, is not well enough developed, so that her emergence as a force in the film's final sequence comes as too much of a surprise. There are some plausibility problems in the portrayal of Dave's relationship with his wife as well. Nonetheless, the picture leaves a powerful, ambivalent ache. Eastwood has hit a raw nerve.

Mystic River is a film about men choosing vengeance, thereby avoiding having to face their grief. In Sean Penn's character we see the American loner hero and his protection of home and family, but with an ugly underside - the narrow sense of certainty and brutal self-assurance - revealed as weakness. The film's willingness to ask disturbing moral questions, and to leave them unanswered, is a rare and welcome virtue.

A real life example of a similar theme is explored in Sam Green and Bill Siegel's documentary, The Weather Underground. With an admirable understanding of their subject, the filmmakers show how hatred can corrupt the highest political ideals, when certain extreme conditions prevail.

In late 1968, the Vietnam War was raging, with thousands of people being killed every month. With the election of Richard Nixon, there was no end in sight. The Students for a Democratic Society, one of the country's biggest antiwar groups, experienced a split in its ranks over what tactics to pursue. A group of militants came to dominate SDS, calling themselves the Weathermen. They believed that the only way to stop the war was to join in a movement for worldwide revolution, and to "bring the war home," in order to turn the American public against the war. After a series of clashes with police in 1969, they went underground. After their bomb factory exploded in 1970, demolishing a New York townhouse and killing three members, they reevaluated their ideas and decided that they would take great care that no one would be killed or injured in their bombings - and in that, they succeeded. The Weather Undergound bombings went on throughout the 70s, and included hits on the Capitol building, the Pentagon, and N.Y. police headquarters. They were on the FBI's "most wanted" list, but managed to avoid capture. Most of them, now with kids of their own and tired of running, surrendered in the 80s, with charges being dropped because the FBI broke so many laws pursuing them that there wasn't much chance of getting convictions.

Bernadine Dohrn, then and now

The film features interviews with former members, including Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, David Gilbert, Kathy Boudin, Cathy Wilkerson and Brian Flanagan. They offer interesting perspectives on how they thought as young revolutionaries, and how they've changed as adults (although most of them recognize their mistakes, they still believe in the necessity for radical change in America). Some appropriately sceptical balance is provided by 60s radical Todd Gitlin, who decries their "Bonnie and Clyde" mentality, and the FBI agent in charge of their pursuit.

Through newsreels and reminiscences we learn the often gripping story of these young people, whose moral revulsion with the undeclared war, and despair at achieving change non-violently, led to what now seems like a kind of insanity - believing that they could pull off an overthrow of the U.S. government. Their ideas and tactics were delusional, and played into the hands of those who would paint the Left as nothing but criminals. But while clearly revealing this, the movie succeeds in showing us how the traumatic events and heady political atmosphere of the time could drive some people to such extremes. For many who lived through the 1960s, especially those who opposed the war, the film will bring back the painful, tragic urgency of those times.

On another level, the picture underscores the need for movements that build gradual support over a broad base of society rather than dreaming of overnight revolutions. An exclusively student-based movement was more liable to succumb to impatience, hatred of enemies, and a cult-like belief in their exclusive mission. The immaturity of much of the antiwar movement's approach, combined with the bad example of marginal groups like the Weather Underground (and illegal, covert government targeting - also documented in the film) led to the collapse of the progressive movement in the 60s. It's taken almost four decades to begin to recover, and to focus on the gradual political organizing and coalition building that will be necessary in order to effect real change.

©2003 Chris Dashiell
CineScene