Mystic River, the much anticipated new film from director Clint Eastwood, left me unmoved. From the outset the film felt overblown and overly melodramatic. Every scene, every bar of music warns you that this story is going to be important and you had best take note. The ominous tone of the movie started to irritate me within minutes.

        Granted, it's an ominous story. The film opens with three boys--Dave, Jimmy, and Sean--neighborhood friends, playing together. Dave is taken away in a car, which mars him horribly, but mars the other two as well. The three find themselves back together 25 years later when the Jimmy's 19 year-old daughter is brutally beaten and murdered. Sean is now a homicide detective and Dave is the prime suspect. And Jimmy? Jimmy is a thug.

        From minute one, Mystic River involves so much pain and so many damaged people, that we never feel any joy at all. Even the camera work is ponderous and deliberate, morbidly so. Eastwood has the camera zoom off into the sky with laborious music--which Eastwood wrote--emphasizing points that acquired significance more through the filming than the story.

        It's as though Clint Eastwood is determined to make Mystic River an Academy Award winner, to me however, he forgets that the first job of a movie is to pull in the audience. I was alienated by the pomposity of this film.

        In fact, the movie is set up to be so burdened, by the time we find the bashed and wretched body of Jimmy's daughter, I had basically decided that I didn't want to see the rest of the movie. Further, I knew that the supposed fall guy for the crime had not done it and was irritated that the other characters in the movie were stupid enough to think that he was guilty.

        Another irritation for me was what I considered to be a huge plot hole. At one point, one of the detectives finds blood in the trunk of the car of the prime suspect. They assume it to be blood of the murdered girl, especially when the blood type matches. Did no one think to see if it was actually the same blood? Hello DNA.

        The treatment of women is wretched! Beyond Jimmy's daughter, who is murdered, there's Jimmy's wife, the Lady Macbeth in waiting, Dave's wife, the living Ophelia, and Sean's wife who calls him all the time but doesn't say a word.

        Not that the men do all that much better. I assume that the novel gives a lot of detail into each of the characters, whereas the film only has time to really focus on Jimmy. I thought Sean Penn was wonderful in the role of Jimmy, even though the material he was given is so melodramatic he has little choice but to overact. Still, I believed everything he did and said, even when the going got tough.

        To sum up, Mystic River bothered me for more reasons than the horrific material of the story. It's a heavy duty film made more so by cumbersome filming.

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