Review: Mystic River

Mystic Mr. Macho -- Eastwood moves on, but much remains the same film review of Mystic River, © 2004, A. Mead
	Historically, the Catholic Church has not treated Mystics very kindly. The Mystic's heretical belief in the direct union of man with God is antithetical to the teachings (and, yes, to the power) of an institution that sees itself as the indispensable intermediary between man and God. The Mystic's perceptions and values are fundamentally alien not only to those of the established Church, but to those of mainstream society as well. For him, the world of appearances is no more than the shifting pattern of ripples on a river's surface. In this view, apparently separate people, events, even the flow of time are all hovering within a vast invisible matrix, a unified realm that the worldly busibodies (us ordinary folks) barely suspect. Good and Evil in this view are not simple opposites, as understood by ordinary men; they may be seen as so intertwined that they cease to be meaningful concepts. Like the Mystic, the Hero figure in mythology also stands essentially apart from society, though his values and focus are typically more mundane than the Mystic's. He may incidentally have extraordinary strength or other miraculous qualities, but what makes him/her Heroic is the willingness to face danger and sacrifice himself for the greater good of society or at least for the good of his tribe. Sometimes, however, society itself falls into corruption and a distinct kind of divine Hero is called forth -- a Moses, Christ, or Mohammed -- to seek a new mandate from a higher source, then stake his own life to bring the revolutionary message to common humanity. All manner of variations on the theme of the extraordinary man or woman abound in the myths and stories of every people from the Sumerians to the Inuit, and the theme remains central even in modern forms of storytelling. Typically, in these stories, society is threatened by evil, laziness, corruption (often from within), so the Hero has to fix things, always at great personal cost and risk. If luck is with him, his mission succeeds, he wins fame and glory, and "gets the girl" too. But sometimes he dies in the attempt. In these basic ways, the Heroic stories in today's movies play out the same motifs as did the Homeric classics of 3000 years ago. As we would expect, modern versions of the archetypal story reflect the modern temperament. When Hollywood reimagines Heroic stories for us, whether the setting be Greco-Roman empire, 17th century buccaneering days, the American Western frontier, or the time long, long, ago... when Star Wars were fought across the galaxies, they are giving us, of course, projections of modern issues, values, and dreams on to those imagined other times. The Athenian or Plains Indian hearer of a mythic tale would have heard a story embedded in a vastly different world view than we could possibly conceive -- one permeated with supernatural forces, a strong sense of tribal identity, a much weaker notion of individual identity and autonomy. Homeric Heroes were constantly interacting with mettlesome Gods and Goddesses interfering with earthly matters. The modern Hero fights his battles in a largely secular arena. Still, it is not unusual for him/her to bear some mystical gift, miraculous good fortune, or as in Star Wars, some means to tap into the supernatural field, the Force, that enables Good to overcome Evil, as did the Heroes of legend. But even Homer's Heroes were complex, contaminated, often fatally flawed. And in the last 50 years, our values have moved on (or maybe back) a bit from the simplicity of John Wayne or Burt Lancaster vs. the Bad Guys. Society and "hero" are seen as amalgams of selfish and selfless motivations, intuitive insight and blind stupidity, and their mission may go aright or may go astray. Good doesn't always win. People are now perceived as multilayered, paradoxically driven, carrying within them their own unseen, uncontrollable force field, the unconscious. Society is no longer seen (at least by some of us) in the simplistic terms of "us vs. them," "good vs. bad," but as a complex interplay of individuals and cohorts, each with mixed motives, whose manifestations of power interact with the vicissitudes of chance. Even in Clint Eastwood's early "spaghetti Westerns" of the 1960's he portrayed these more complex, anti-heroic Good Guys, whose charm was to amalgamate all-too-human flaws with Heroic invulnerability and detachment. In this way his characters played ironically off the contrast with their simplistic prototypes of earlier Westerns and childhood stories. `Harry Callahan -- you don't assign him to a case, you just turn him loose... He's not prejudiced, he hates everybody equally.` -- Dirty Harry, 1971 With Dirty Harry, Eastwood played a damaged, justifiably rageful maverick cop, thrashing about in a nasty, corrupt society that was impotent to deal with the evil lurking within itself. But, as time moved on, so did Eastwood's thematic complexity. In Unforgiven, society and its members are complex, multilayered, morally ambiguous. Here, the impure, fallen "hero" struggles to do the right thing in the midst of a terribly messy earthly situation. Even at this point in his work, some common elements start to take shape, some "core values" discernable in the early Westerns and Dirty Harry series, which then were progressively elaborated and refined as he matured as a director: you can't trust anybody you especially can't trust authorities, the guys society has put in power to protect it (e.g. policemen), because they're usually either too corrupt or too weak to do their job therefore, the moral man of action must sometimes take a stand against a corrupt world and its authority figures power rules the world, so the Good Guy must sometimes (often, in fact) use force to fix things but power corrupts those who exercise it, obviously those in positions of authority, but also even the heroic individual who sets out to do Good ... so things are likely to get pretty mucked up, regardless! Mystic River develops these themes more richly and insightfully than any of the director's previous work. From the opening street scene where we see 3 young boys' ball fall into the depths of the sewer, never to be recovered, we are introduced to the notion that beneath the surface there's a shadow world. Dark, bad things start to happen immediately, as one of the boys, Dave, is carried off by a phony police detective and his companion who wears an ominously large gold crucifix ring. While Dave's sister is receiving First Communion in the glowing light of the cathedral, in some dark cellar, little Dave is being initiated into aspects of Grecian culture that he would rather not know about. He escapes from his tutors, manages to get home, but as the shades are drawn in his house, we know he'll never be the same. But neither will his 2 stick ball companions, Jimmy and Sean. The consequences, in fact, will flow on into the boys' lives 30 years forward when the main action of the film occurs. In that 30 years, much has changed, but much has not -- the riverside Boston neighborhood, where all three still live, looks about the same. Not "Good, Bad, and Ugly", but another Unholy Trinity... Jimmy, to play the vengeful Father role in this Trinity, has grown up to be a tough-boy; an ex-con, he's now more or less going straight, a corner store owner and father to 3 daughters. Dave, the sacrificial Son figure, still bears the weight of his awful past on his shoulders. While trying to be a husband and a father to his own son, he still daydreams of vampires and their blood-bourne inescapable legacy; he and his life are stunted. Sean has become a cop, ostensibly filling the good (holy) role society expects and needs; but Sean is a Ghost-like figure himself. His wife has mysteriously left him. She calls daily, but doesn't speak; and so he lives a paled, shadowy existence, out of touch, trying to figure out what has gone wrong, why his female half won't talk to him. Jimmy's eldest girl Katie is found murdered; Sean and his black detective partner, Whitey, get on the case. Dave, coming home cut-up and bloodied late the night of the murder, becomes a suspect. Jimmy and Sean both seek the killer -- one seeking personal, blood vengeance, the other doing his job, carrying out society's mandate (i.e. one of the authorities you can't really trust). Dave wrestles with his old demons. As in an ancient Greek tragedy, the three boys of this Trinity inexorably play out the roles fate has assigned them. Old injuries, crimes, and betrayals gradually surface; as in Classic drama, we see fate shaping man and events, as if a powerful current from which we can't escape. In a quasimystical pulling off of veils, we are shown that all things connect beneath the surface, working beneath and within the flow of time; and like the Mystic, we see the deceptive nature of appearances, and the paradoxical, intertwined interplay of what the naive call Good and Evil. The themes from Eastwood's past continue to inform the action of Mystic River. No one can be trusted, especially authority figures like policemen and churchmen. Except for the fake policeman pedophile at the beginning, the police are not shown as morally corrupt or badly motivated, they're just flawed humans doing their job. So they make bungling errors -- they resort to corrupt means to gather evidence (stealing Dave's car), and end up corrupting the evidence they could have used against him. But in this story, the would be Heroes, individuals trying to do the right thing, in most cases end up doing further catastrophic damage! Jimmy and Dave, neither trusting the Law to do its job right, both end up with bloody hands. Dave's wife, Celeste, ignorant about his old, buried injury, but fearful of his strange behavior, gives false damning evidence about him to Jimmy, thereby facilitating, maybe causing, his death. As in most of Eastwood's previous films, the focus is on men -- their difficulties and unsettled roles as males trying to live in and with society, but often alienated from it or fighting it. The intertwined fates of Jimmy, Dave, and Sean form the core of this story. But all three have wives who play complementary but essential, key roles in the course of the action. Each of these females reflects and counterbalances the role in the Trinity being carried by their male half, in a subtle parallelism that you'll want to study more as you see this film a second and third time. Another subtle detail resonates with deeply feminine symbolism. The body of Jimmy's daughter Katie was eventually found in the dilapidated, abandoned bear's pit in a nearby city park, long since overgrown by vegetation. In prehistoric times, the bear was an important totem animal, known for its ferociously protective mothering behavior, and, for this and maybe other reasons, is believed to be linked to the Great Mother goddess. Because of its annual hibernation / reawakening cycle, the bear was also symbol of death and regeneration, and like the Great Mother, symbolized an holistic world-view -- a conception probably somewhat more primitive than the Mystical/Gnostic view described above, but closer to that than the Judeo-Christian view (man exiled from paradise for his sinful behavior by a wrathful God). But now, of course, the bear is long gone, her pit/cage is abandoned and overgrown. Mothers no longer protect their children; Katie's mother is dead; and in this film other mothers' neglected children become random killers. So, Goddess is dead. [God is also notably missing in this film; both gone underground, underwater, out to sea?] God may have gone missing, but Christian imagery is thrown in your face repeatedly. What does this mean? It's clearly more than just background context for the Irish Boston neighborhood and its inhabitants -- for the evoked associations are powerful and uniformly negative. Every (visually imposing) appearance of the crucifix is accompanied by a parallel ironic evil occurrence. I've already mentioned the coincident Communion and below-ground rape at the film's outset. Near the end of the film, we see, for the first time, a massive sword-like cross tattooed on Jimmy's back, symbolizing his burden of guilt at having killed his childhood pal, but also his manly seizing of power to cut to the heart of things, right or wrong. It's not clear if he's done right or wrong actually. Killing Dave, he has made a mistake of sorts. But Jimmy's wife thinks he's acted like a real hero and let's him know with sweet words and even sweeter actions to back them up right then and there! From this pervasively ironic use of Christian imagery are we supposed to feel that institutional religion, specifically the Catholic Church, is an agent of Evil? That pedophilic sexual abuse by priests (as has come to light in Boston and other places) typifies the special Evil that the Church is heir to? Those are legitimate interpretations, but I'd suggest not staying stuck on those sandbars, for they are just surface phenomena. There is more depth being sounded in Mystic River. Seeing the film in the context of Eastwood's past work may help us to see a bigger picture. I'm suggesting that the Catholic Church symbolizes those social constructions that men depend on, but which are ultimately untrustworthy. Untrustworthy, because, as holders of power, they constellate their own agenda for survival and maintenance of their power, to which their "service to mankind" agenda may become secondary. In Eastwood's "big picture" there ARE evil, destructive elements at large in the world, in people, but particularly in powerful social institutions. In this picture, human individuals are weak and vulnerable, whether from youth and innocence, or ignorance, low social status, and all that follows from that. In the midst of these forces, our own actions, accidents, and the hidden workings of Fate carry us along, so that we seldom see the real causes or effects of what we do or what is done to us. And yet, somehow, this murky flow is all One, so that as individual action, powerful forces, and chance work through the world, their effects propagate in unseen but thoroughly connected ways. But the picture is yet more richly contradictory; for, standing opposed philosophically and emotionally to this "mystical current" is what I see as the key theme that unites Mystic River with the corpus of Eastwood's work -- an ethic of radical individualism which says: "Since society is corrupt, the ultimate moral agent must be the lone individual, taking the burden of responsibility for right action, the execution of power, the risk of failure, and being wrong upon himself. Though subject to the inevitable corrupting effect of power, and all sorts of other flaws working in himself, the moral man of action has no other choice but to act this way." [And, as an added bonus, it turns out that women are really turned on by men who act like this!] The distinctly modern "heroes" (if that word can be stretched to include characters like Jimmy) of Eastwood's later films move in a Godless (and Godess-less) world, unredeemed by humanistic values, because society itself has become morally corrupt. Thus, it is not at all clear where their values are based, if not in religious teachings or a social contract. It seems that the Eastwood Heroic values come from within the characters' own Nature, but just how they get there is left unstated. In spite of the moral bogginess (or you could say richness) of the latter-day Eastwood "picture," we must admire his artistic faithfulness to some core conceptions. He has steadily explored and reinterpreted the Heroic challenge -- the troubled relation of extraordinary man to society, his struggles with values and right action -- themes that have fascinated us and inspired writers since ancient times. God(s) and religiously inculcated values are not potent elements of the equation any longer, but in their absence, morally driven modern man has an even more difficult struggle than the Heroes of old. Whereas Eastwood's early films showed us iconic, prototypical, albeit ironic, even comical Heroes, his later films (Unforgiven, Mystic River...), show us all-too-human, authentic characters, struggling with very believable, painful, morally ambiguous situations. They challenge us to feel and understand more deeply the very complex moral dilemmas we non-heroes actually face in daily life. His work has clearly moved on and matured, yet in some essential ways Mr. Eastwood has stayed true to course. Like the ancient Greek plays that aimed to move their audience at their moral/spiritual core, these later films of his tread in some very deep waters and deserve our very considerable respect. Geoffrey O'Brien wrote a fine review, placing Mystic River in the context of Eastwood's past work, in the NY Review of Books last year: Fallen World, NYRB, Dec. 18, 2003. If you can't access it online, let me know if you'd like me to send you a copy of the article. clicking here will open a new browser page; close that window to return to this page -- your "Back" button may not work) Email comments to [email protected]

Mystic Mr. Macho -- Eastwood moves on, but much remains the same

Historically, the Catholic Church has not treated Mystics very kindly. The Mystic's heretical belief in the direct union of man with God is antithetical to the teachings (and, yes, to the power) of an institution that sees itself as the indispensable intermediary between man and God. The Mystic's perceptions and values are fundamentally alien not only to those of the established Church, but to those of mainstream society as well. For him, the world of appearances is no more than the shifting pattern of ripples on a river's surface. In this view, apparently separate people, events, even the flow of time are all hovering within a vast invisible matrix, a unified realm that the worldly busibodies (us ordinary folks) barely suspect. Good and Evil in this view are not simple opposites, as understood by ordinary men; they may be seen as so intertwined that they cease to be meaningful concepts.

Like the Mystic, the Hero figure in mythology also stands essentially apart from society, though his values and focus are typically more mundane than the Mystic's. He may incidentally have extraordinary strength or other miraculous qualities, but what makes him/her Heroic is the willingness to face danger and sacrifice himself for the greater good of society or at least for the good of his tribe. Sometimes, however, society itself falls into corruption and a distinct kind of divine Hero is called forth -- a Moses, Christ, or Mohammed -- to seek a new mandate from a higher source, then stake his own life to bring the revolutionary message to common humanity.

All manner of variations on the theme of the extraordinary man or woman abound in the myths and stories of every people from the Sumerians to the Inuit, and the theme remains central even in modern forms of storytelling. Typically, in these stories, society is threatened by evil, laziness, corruption (often from within), so the Hero has to fix things, always at great personal cost and risk. If luck is with him, his mission succeeds, he wins fame and glory, and "gets the girl" too. But sometimes he dies in the attempt. In these basic ways, the Heroic stories in today's movies play out the same motifs as did the Homeric classics of 3000 years ago.

As we would expect, modern versions of the archetypal story reflect the modern temperament. When Hollywood reimagines Heroic stories for us, whether the setting be Greco-Roman empire, 17th century buccaneering days, the American Western frontier, or the time long, long, ago... when Star Wars were fought across the galaxies, they are giving us, of course, projections of modern issues, values, and dreams on to those imagined other times. The Athenian or Plains Indian hearer of a mythic tale would have heard a story embedded in a vastly different world view than we could possibly conceive -- one permeated with supernatural forces, a strong sense of tribal identity, a much weaker notion of individual identity and autonomy. Homeric Heroes were constantly interacting with mettlesome Gods and Goddesses interfering with earthly matters. The modern Hero fights his battles in a largely secular arena. Still, it is not unusual for him/her to bear some mystical gift, miraculous good fortune, or as in Star Wars, some means to tap into the supernatural field, the Force, that enables Good to overcome Evil, as did the Heroes of legend.

But even Homer's Heroes were complex, contaminated, often fatally flawed. And in the last 50 years, our values have moved on (or maybe back) a bit from the simplicity of John Wayne or Burt Lancaster vs. the Bad Guys. Society and "hero" are seen as amalgams of selfish and selfless motivations, intuitive insight and blind stupidity, and their mission may go aright or may go astray. Good doesn't always win. People are now perceived as multilayered, paradoxically driven, carrying within them their own unseen, uncontrollable force field, the unconscious. Society is no longer seen (at least by some of us) in the simplistic terms of "us vs. them," "good vs. bad," but as a complex interplay of individuals and cohorts, each with mixed motives, whose manifestations of power interact with the vicissitudes of chance. Even in Clint Eastwood's early "spaghetti Westerns" of the 1960's he portrayed these more complex, anti-heroic Good Guys, whose charm was to amalgamate all-too-human flaws with Heroic invulnerability and detachment. In this way his characters played ironically off the contrast with their simplistic prototypes of earlier Westerns and childhood stories.

Harry Callahan -- you don't assign him to a case, you just turn him loose... He's not prejudiced, he hates everybody equally.

-- Dirty Harry, 1971

With Dirty Harry, Eastwood played a damaged, justifiably rageful maverick cop, thrashing about in a nasty, corrupt society that was impotent to deal with the evil lurking within itself. But, as time moved on, so did Eastwood's thematic complexity. In Unforgiven, society and its members are complex, multilayered, morally ambiguous. Here, the impure, fallen "hero" struggles to do the right thing in the midst of a terribly messy earthly situation.

Even at this point in his work, some common elements start to take shape, some "core values" discernable in the early Westerns and Dirty Harry series, which then were progressively elaborated and refined as he matured as a director:

you can't trust anybody
you especially can't trust authorities, the guys society has put in power to protect it (e.g. policemen), because they're usually either too corrupt or too weak to do their job
therefore, the moral man of action must sometimes take a stand against a corrupt world and its authority figures
power rules the world, so the Good Guy must sometimes (often, in fact) use force to fix things
but power corrupts those who exercise it, obviously those in positions of authority, but also even the heroic individual who sets out to do Good
... so things are likely to get pretty mucked up, regardless!

Mystic River develops these themes more richly and insightfully than any of the director's previous work. From the opening street scene where we see 3 young boys' ball fall into the depths of the sewer, never to be recovered, we are introduced to the notion that beneath the surface there's a shadow world. Dark, bad things start to happen immediately, as one of the boys, Dave, is carried off by a phony police detective and his companion who wears an ominously large gold crucifix ring. While Dave's sister is receiving First Communion in the glowing light of the cathedral, in some dark cellar, little Dave is being initiated into aspects of Grecian culture that he would rather not know about. He escapes from his tutors, manages to get home, but as the shades are drawn in his house, we know he'll never be the same. But neither will his 2 stick ball companions, Jimmy and Sean. The consequences, in fact, will flow on into the boys' lives 30 years forward when the main action of the film occurs. In that 30 years, much has changed, but much has not -- the riverside Boston neighborhood, where all three still live, looks about the same.

Not "Good, Bad, and Ugly", but another Unholy Trinity...

Jimmy, to play the vengeful Father role in this Trinity, has grown up to be a tough-boy; an ex-con, he's now more or less going straight, a corner store owner and father to 3 daughters. Dave, the sacrificial Son figure, still bears the weight of his awful past on his shoulders. While trying to be a husband and a father to his own son, he still daydreams of vampires and their blood-bourne inescapable legacy; he and his life are stunted. Sean has become a cop, ostensibly filling the good (holy) role society expects and needs; but Sean is a Ghost-like figure himself. His wife has mysteriously left him. She calls daily, but doesn't speak; and so he lives a paled, shadowy existence, out of touch, trying to figure out what has gone wrong, why his female half won't talk to him.

Jimmy's eldest girl Katie is found murdered; Sean and his black detective partner, Whitey, get on the case. Dave, coming home cut-up and bloodied late the night of the murder, becomes a suspect. Jimmy and Sean both seek the killer -- one seeking personal, blood vengeance, the other doing his job, carrying out society's mandate (i.e. one of the authorities you can't really trust). Dave wrestles with his old demons. As in an ancient Greek tragedy, the three boys of this Trinity inexorably play out the roles fate has assigned them. Old injuries, crimes, and betrayals gradually surface; as in Classic drama, we see fate shaping man and events, as if a powerful current from which we can't escape. In a quasimystical pulling off of veils, we are shown that all things connect beneath the surface, working beneath and within the flow of time; and like the Mystic, we see the deceptive nature of appearances, and the paradoxical, intertwined interplay of what the naive call Good and Evil.

The themes from Eastwood's past continue to inform the action of Mystic River. No one can be trusted, especially authority figures like policemen and churchmen. Except for the fake policeman pedophile at the beginning, the police are not shown as morally corrupt or badly motivated, they're just flawed humans doing their job. So they make bungling errors -- they resort to corrupt means to gather evidence (stealing Dave's car), and end up corrupting the evidence they could have used against him. But in this story, the would be Heroes, individuals trying to do the right thing, in most cases end up doing further catastrophic damage! Jimmy and Dave, neither trusting the Law to do its job right, both end up with bloody hands. Dave's wife, Celeste, ignorant about his old, buried injury, but fearful of his strange behavior, gives false damning evidence about him to Jimmy, thereby facilitating, maybe causing, his death.

As in most of Eastwood's previous films, the focus is on men -- their difficulties and unsettled roles as males trying to live in and with society, but often alienated from it or fighting it. The intertwined fates of Jimmy, Dave, and Sean form the core of this story. But all three have wives who play complementary but essential, key roles in the course of the action. Each of these females reflects and counterbalances the role in the Trinity being carried by their male half, in a subtle parallelism that you'll want to study more as you see this film a second and third time.

Another subtle detail resonates with deeply feminine symbolism. The body of Jimmy's daughter Katie was eventually found in the dilapidated, abandoned bear's pit in a nearby city park, long since overgrown by vegetation. In prehistoric times, the bear was an important totem animal, known for its ferociously protective mothering behavior, and, for this and maybe other reasons, is believed to be linked to the Great Mother goddess. Because of its annual hibernation / reawakening cycle, the bear was also symbol of death and regeneration, and like the Great Mother, symbolized an holistic world-view -- a conception probably somewhat more primitive than the Mystical/Gnostic view described above, but closer to that than the Judeo-Christian view (man exiled from paradise for his sinful behavior by a wrathful God). But now, of course, the bear is long gone, her pit/cage is abandoned and overgrown. Mothers no longer protect their children; Katie's mother is dead; and in this film other mothers' neglected children become random killers. So, Goddess is dead. [God is also notably missing in this film; both gone underground, underwater, out to sea?]

God may have gone missing, but Christian imagery is thrown in your face repeatedly. What does this mean? It's clearly more than just background context for the Irish Boston neighborhood and its inhabitants -- for the evoked associations are powerful and uniformly negative. Every (visually imposing) appearance of the crucifix is accompanied by a parallel ironic evil occurrence. I've already mentioned the coincident Communion and below-ground rape at the film's outset. Near the end of the film, we see, for the first time, a massive sword-like cross tattooed on Jimmy's back, symbolizing his burden of guilt at having killed his childhood pal, but also his manly seizing of power to cut to the heart of things, right or wrong. It's not clear if he's done right or wrong actually. Killing Dave, he has made a mistake of sorts. But Jimmy's wife thinks he's acted like a real hero and let's him know with sweet words and even sweeter actions to back them up right then and there!

From this pervasively ironic use of Christian imagery are we supposed to feel that institutional religion, specifically the Catholic Church, is an agent of Evil? That pedophilic sexual abuse by priests (as has come to light in Boston and other places) typifies the special Evil that the Church is heir to? Those are legitimate interpretations, but I'd suggest not staying stuck on those sandbars, for they are just surface phenomena. There is more depth being sounded in Mystic River.

Seeing the film in the context of Eastwood's past work may help us to see a bigger picture. I'm suggesting that the Catholic Church symbolizes those social constructions that men depend on, but which are ultimately untrustworthy. Untrustworthy, because, as holders of power, they constellate their own agenda for survival and maintenance of their power, to which their "service to mankind" agenda may become secondary. In Eastwood's "big picture" there ARE evil, destructive elements at large in the world, in people, but particularly in powerful social institutions. In this picture, human individuals are weak and vulnerable, whether from youth and innocence, or ignorance, low social status, and all that follows from that. In the midst of these forces, our own actions, accidents, and the hidden workings of Fate carry us along, so that we seldom see the real causes or effects of what we do or what is done to us. And yet, somehow, this murky flow is all One, so that as individual action, powerful forces, and chance work through the world, their effects propagate in unseen but thoroughly connected ways.

But the picture is yet more richly contradictory; for, standing opposed philosophically and emotionally to this "mystical current" is what I see as the key theme that unites Mystic River with the corpus of Eastwood's work -- an ethic of radical individualism which says: "Since society is corrupt, the ultimate moral agent must be the lone individual, taking the burden of responsibility for right action, the execution of power, the risk of failure, and being wrong upon himself. Though subject to the inevitable corrupting effect of power, and all sorts of other flaws working in himself, the moral man of action has no other choice but to act this way." [And, as an added bonus, it turns out that women are really turned on by men who act like this!] The distinctly modern "heroes" (if that word can be stretched to include characters like Jimmy) of Eastwood's later films move in a Godless (and Godess-less) world, unredeemed by humanistic values, because society itself has become morally corrupt. Thus, it is not at all clear where their values are based, if not in religious teachings or a social contract. It seems that the Eastwood Heroic values come from within the characters' own Nature, but just how they get there is left unstated.

In spite of the moral bogginess (or you could say richness) of the latter-day Eastwood "picture," we must admire his artistic faithfulness to some core conceptions. He has steadily explored and reinterpreted the Heroic challenge -- the troubled relation of extraordinary man to society, his struggles with values and right action -- themes that have fascinated us and inspired writers since ancient times. God(s) and religiously inculcated values are not potent elements of the equation any longer, but in their absence, morally driven modern man has an even more difficult struggle than the Heroes of old. Whereas Eastwood's early films showed us iconic, prototypical, albeit ironic, even comical Heroes, his later films (Unforgiven, Mystic River...), show us all-too-human, authentic characters, struggling with very believable, painful, morally ambiguous situations. They challenge us to feel and understand more deeply the very complex moral dilemmas we non-heroes actually face in daily life.

His work has clearly moved on and matured, yet in some essential ways Mr. Eastwood has stayed true to course. Like the ancient Greek plays that aimed to move their audience at their moral/spiritual core, these later films of his tread in some very deep waters and deserve our very considerable respect.

Geoffrey O'Brien wrote a fine review, placing Mystic River in the context of Eastwood's past work, in the NY Review of Books last year:
Fallen World, NYRB, Dec. 18, 2003. If you can't access it online, let me know if you'd like me to send you a copy of the article.
clicking here will open a new browser page; close that window to return to this page -- your "Back" button may not work)

Email comments to [email protected]