Eastwood guides all-star cast upstream

Mystic River marks Clint Eastwood's 24th stint in the director's chair, and by all accounts, it's his best. Sure, he reinvigorated the Western with his Oscar-winner Unforgiven and made one of the '90s most overlooked gems in the form of A Perfect World, but here, Dirty Harry elevates what could've been your standard Boston-based police procedural/Irish gangland saga to Shakespearean proportions.\nSean Penn leads an extraordinary ensemble cast as Jimmy, an ex-con sent on the straight and narrow after having been released from the pen (no pun intended) and gaining sole custody of his infant daughter, Katie (Emmy Rossum). Together with his wife, Annabeth (a terrifyingly good Laura Linney), he raises the now teenaged Katie, as well as two younger scamps. Tim Robbins co-stars as Dave, a marginally employed handyman with a wife, Celeste (the always-reliable Marcia Gay Harden), a young son and a closet chock-full of skeletons. Rounding out the cast is Kevin Bacon, who portrays Sean, a Beantown cop with marital woes and a smart-assed partner, ironically named Whitey (Laurence Fishburne). \nThe three men, Jimmy, Dave and Sean, were friends as children. That is until, one fateful day, two men claiming to be police officers abduct Dave. What ensues is four days spent in a locked basement presumably prey to a horrid onslaught of sexual abuse. The boys sever ties in wake of the trauma, only to be reunited when tragedy strikes again. Katie is brutally murdered, Sean is assigned the case, Dave is the primary suspect and a grief-stricken Jimmy is set loose upon a mafia-tinged warpath.\nThe acting is solid across the board, but it's Penn (harnessing his inner De Niro) and Robbins (seemingly shrinking under the weight of his character's scorched psyche) who standout. Eastwood's direction, which by nature is somewhat slow and languid, guides the narrative and moreso his cast's finely tuned performances perfectly. Viewers grow to know these troubled characters and major, even welcomed, gray areas are established. That the director also provides a hauntingly beautiful score doesn't hurt matters either. Once the payoff is doled out, it's a heartbreaker, albeit a somewhat overwrought and ambiguous one.\nMystic River is a major achievement in a film career that's spanned nearly 50 years. It's not happy-go-lucky Friday night entertainment, mind you, but a cinematic event nonetheless.