Mystic River: Boston red in tooth and claw

At the end of this movie (stop reading here if you haven't seen it), Sean Penn's Jimmy character stares out the window of his New England clapboard house and says, "I killed the wrong man." He looks like he's in a trance, as if he might begin to feel something like the horror we, the audience, feel after having watched him coldly shoot his childhood friend in the head like you would a crippled horse. But then Jimmy's wife comes over and coos in his ear that he only did what he had to; like her, he's strong in a world of pathetic weaklings, and that's all that's important. So you killed an innocent, vulnerable man-- whatever. Let's get it on, big daddy.

And that, in essence, is the message of this movie. Something really bothered me about this film-- more than just the fact that the wife character is way too underdeveloped to imbue with such malevolence at the end. If there's a message here, it seems to be that the world is amoral, so why even try? Poor Dave gets the short end of the stick from beginning to end: abducted and molested as a child, wrongly suspected of murdering his friend's daughter, and then murdered himself by said friend. As much as you want something to happen to redeem Dave's sad life, it never does. And Jimmy suspects-- he seems to want there to be an understandable reason-- that his daughter's murder was some kind of retribution for his earlier transgressions. As it turns out, though, it was just kind of a freak incident. [I guess you could argue that there was *some* kind of cosmic retribution at work, since the guy who killed his daughter was the son of a guy he killed earlier. But it was not as if that motivated the kid, who had no idea about the earlier murder]. And then there's Dave's wife Celeste, who finally breaks under the strain of believing that her husband's murdered somebody and gone crazy, and starts telling people about it. For her troubles, she ends up with a dead husband and a depressed child.

So as much as (I suppose) we are expected to feel revulsion when Jimmy's wife starts her psychopathic monologue, we can't escape feeling that she's right. She and Jimmy will go on living with their little family (minus one), going to parades and first communions and eventually coming to "rule this town" (the wife's own bizarre non-sequitur, same monologue). And did friend number 3, Sean the Honest Detective, arrest Jimmy for killing Dave? No, he did not. What, after all, would be the point in a world in which horrible things happen every day and for apparently no reason? Where sensitive people like Dave and Celeste, who are trying to be decent, repeatedly get chewed up and spit out by predators of various sorts? Why even try?

It's one thing, I think, to create a chilling and realistic depiction of the world as an amoral and arbitrary place. But the nice thing about *people* is that they are not, as a rule, amoral or arbitrary beings. They are skilled at doing awful things to one another, but they are also capable of extraordinary goodness. Mystic River spares no screen time at all for goodness, which makes it a truly depressing drag to watch.