A dark and sobering tale of violence

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.

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.