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October 10, 2003
The End of Mystic River
The arrival of Clint Eastwood's Mystic River is as good an excuse as any to read the almost-astonishing Dennis Lehane novel on which it's based. But here's my advice: skip the last twenty pages.
The novel's characters are deeply layered, and Lehane gives each the attention he deserves, introducing them as children and then picking them up again as they approach the middle of their tempestuous lives. He connects their psychology to their childhood in a nuanced way that makes senses but defies predictability, and he watches carefully as the stress of the central murder unravels each of them. When you start chasing demons, the ones you most have to worry about are inside you, and Lehane shows how these demons take over the victim's father as he struggles to make sense of a world without his daughter. As the novel continues, each character regresses into a warped version of their earlier selves, struggling to make peace with their past while understanding their future has been destroyed. But:
Maybe the most crucial pages of any mystery are the last ones, and Lehane blows it. His ending is existentially sound but emotionally hollow. I'm hoping that in his interpretation of the story, Eastwood follows the story and the characters to their natural ends, as it is from the end that the rest of the journey draws its meaning.
In this way, the end of this film is as crucial as the end of In the Cut, although Campion had a more difficult path than Eastwood. Although most of Eastwood's previous films have a disjointedness to them, I'm optimistic that he will take hold of Lehane's storyline and render it deftly, abandoning it only in the closing moments.
