The beginning of Clint Eastwood's mighty Mystic River, which opens tonight in Taiwan, involves a camera shot that drifts down from its aerial survey of Boston and alights in a nondescript blue-collar neighborhood of triple-decker wood-frame houses and scuffed-up sidewalks. A couple of dads sit on a back porch drinking beer and talking about the Red Sox, who are in the midst of their ill-starred 1975 season, while three boys -- Dave Boyle, Jimmy Markum and Sean Devine -- play hockey in the street below.
The somber music (composed by Eastwood) and the shadows that flicker in the hard, washed-out New England light create an atmosphere of impending danger, which arrives soon enough as a dark sedan pulls up and then drives away with Dave in the back.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF WARNER MOVIES
Dave's abduction is an act of inexplicable, almost metaphysical evil, and this story of guilt, grief and vengeance grows out of it like a mass of dark weeds. At its starkest, the film, like the novel by Dennis Lehane on which it is based, is a parable of incurable trauma, in which violence begets more violence and the primal violation of innocence can never be set right. Mystic River is the rare American movie that aspires to -- and achieves -- the full weight and darkness of tragedy.
Eastwood and his screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, have also been faithful to the sense of place that makes Lehane's book a superior piece of crime fiction. Much of the dialogue has been plucked directly from the pages of the book, and it retains the salty, fatalistic tang of the ungentrified streets of Irish-Catholic Boston.
A quarter-century after the kidnapping, Dave, Sean and Jimmy have settled into ordinary adult lives of compromise and disappointment. Sean (Kevin Bacon) works in the homicide division of the Massachusetts State Police. His wife has left him but still calls him on his cellphone and remains silent while he stammers questions and half-hearted apologies.
Jimmy (Sean Penn), whose first wife died while he was serving a prison sentence for robbery, has remarried; with visible effort, he has reinvented himself as a responsible citizen, running a small grocery store in his old neighborhood. Dave (Tim Robbins), who walks with the shuffling, stoop-shouldered gait of a timid, overgrown child, has a son of his own and a skittish, devoted wife named Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden).
Celeste and Annabeth (Laura Linney), Jimmy's second wife, are cousins, and though Mystic River takes place in a modern American city, it is as thoroughly steeped in tribal codes of kinship, blood and honor as a Shakespeare play or a John Ford western.
Everyone seems to be nursing a dark secret or an ulterior motive, and each emerges slowly into the light in the wake of a second senseless crime, the murder of Jimmy's 19-year-old daughter, Katie (Emmy Rossum). Because Katie's body was found in a park that lies within state jurisdiction, the case falls to Sean and his partner, Whitey Powers (Laurence Fishburne), and their investigation sets every sleeping dog in the neighborhood howling.
Suspicion falls on Katie's boyfriend, Brendan Harris (Thomas Guiry), whose family is connected to Jimmy through an obscure underworld vendetta, and also on Dave, who saw Katie in a bar the night she was killed and who came home late with blood on his clothes.
As with most murder mysteries, the densely woven narrative of Mystic River is a skein of coincidences and somewhat implausible connections. What gives the movie its extraordinary intensity of feeling is the way Eastwood grounds the conventions of pulp opera in an unvarnished, thickly inhabited reality. There are scenes that swell with almost unbearable feeling, and the director's ambitions are enormous, but the movie almost entirely avoids melodrama or grandiosity.
Eastwood has found actors who can bear the weight and illuminate the abyss their characters inhabit. Penn, his eyes darting as if in anticipation of another blow, his shoulders tensed to return it, is almost beyond praise. Jimmy Markum is not only one of the best performances of the year, but also one of the definitive pieces of screen acting in the last half-century, the culmination of a realist tradition that began in the old Actor's Studio and begat Brando, Dean, Pacino and De Niro.
But Penn, as gifted and disciplined as any of his precursors, makes them all look like, well, actors. He has purged his work of any trace of theatricality or showmanship while retaining all the directness and force that their applications of the Method brought into American movies.
The clearest proof of his achievement may be that, as overpowering as his performance is, it never overshadows the rest of the cast. This tragedy, after all, is not individual but communal, even though each character must bear it alone.
Bacon, even-keeled and self-effacing, is superb, as is Fishburne, whose humor and skepticism keep the movie from being swallowed up in gloom. Whitey (whose nickname has survived the racial transformation of his character from page to screen) is the only major character who is not implicated in the tribal history of the neighborhood, and his jokes and observations are reminders of the wider world.
Robbins, in some ways, faces the greatest challenge, since he must play a man whose damaged personality is an unstable alloy of vulnerability, violence and cunning. You want to feel sorry for him, but he also scares you. Which is the effect he has on Celeste, who provides the film's most haunting image of terror and heartbreak, just as Annabeth, emerging from the shadows near the end, articulates with frightening clarity the ruthlessness that passes, in this fallen world, for justice.
The twists of plot that every good thriller needs are also, in this case, revelations of character. The jolts of surprise you feel when crucial bits of information are disclosed are nothing compared to the shock of seeing who people really are, and what they are capable of doing in the name of love, loyalty or self-preservation.
When Sean realizes he must tell his old friend Jimmy that his beloved daughter is dead, he wonders what he should say: "God said you owed another marker, and he came to collect."
This grim theology is as close as anyone comes to faith, but Eastwood's understanding of the universe, and of human nature, is if anything even more pessimistic. The evil of murderers and child molesters represents a fundamental imbalance in the order of things that neither the forces of law and order nor the impulse toward vengeance can rectify.
Dave, looking back on his ordeal, describes himself as "the boy who escaped from wolves," and his flight is accompanied by noises that sound like the howls of wild animals. The actions of his abusers spring from some bestial, uncivilized impulse that cries out to be exterminated.
The problem -- the tragedy -- is that grief, loyalty and even love spring from the same source. When Jimmy learns that he has lost the child who saved his life by forcing him into responsibility, he rages like a rabid beast, and you know his fury will only lead to more hurt.
"We bury our sins, and wash them clean," he declares later on as he prepares to enact his vengeance, but this is wishful thinking, mere sentiment, and you suspect that Jimmy knows it. Eastwood surely does.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless