Preface

• Mystic River is a movie that came out in 2002 and stars Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, and a couple other people.
• This movie was up for a bunch of Oscars the year it came out, and it’s a movie I’d been meaning to get around to seeing for a long while.
• It’s about a murder investigation that (no spoilers…) affects this entire Bostonian community, especially those three guys I mentioned above who were childhood best friends.
• And this movie feels kinda like a Shakespearian tragedy. Not cuz it’s that good, just cuz it feels tragic…

Review

• The acting in Mystic River is really good, I know there were multiple Oscar noms/wins around the board for this movie.
• My favorite performance of them all is probably Tim Robbins.
• I thought his characters had the fullest arc, starting at childhood, moving into the present time in this movie, and concluding where it should conclude.
• I just liked seeing this screwed up guy on screen!
• Sean Penn was good too, I thought he really made the role his own, brought a lot of emotion that wasn’t on the pages of the screenplay.
• Kevin Bacon was awesome too.
• Whenever Kevin Bacon plays a cop, I’m in. He played a cop in this movie and I loved him.
• And the script to this movie is great.
• The dialogue in this movie is very stop-and-go, like there’s a lot of dialogue then there’s none, but the overall story of the movie was really well thought out.
• It doesn’t have tons of twists and turns, but it feels like a movie that’s based on an actual investigation where real (and occasionally slow) things happen,
• And even though the movie is slow, it’s never too slow.
• Director Clint Eastwood keeps you engaged and following along with the story the whole time, keeping you guessing who did the crime.
• And I mentioned earlier that the whole thing felt like a Shakespearian tragedy.
• Because, well… It did.
• Like, every single character in this movie is humanly tragic.
• Not like The Departed where everyone is “a bad person” but more like everyone has some kind of tragic characteristic that makes them impure, for a lack of better words.
• It feels like a movie where nothing that happens is redeemable, so some of the characters just see how far they can dig themselves into the dirt.
• I loved seeing characters like that in a heavy movie like this, where there was lots of realism.
• The movie isn’t perfect, there are a couple subplots (like Kevin Bacon’s love interest) I could have done without.
• But this is a movie that I walked away from and recognized that it definitely should have been nominated for Best Picture the year it came out, because a “crime tragedy” isn’t a movie you see almost ever.
• There were some minor things the movie could have improved on, but overall I thought Mystic River was really well done and I’m gonna give it an A-.

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So guys, those are my thoughts on Mystic River! Be sure to leave your thoughts on this movie in the comments down below. And as always, thanks for reading guys.