Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, which opened this year's New York Film Festival on a somber but resonant note, is perhaps the finest western ever to be set in South Boston. Huddled clapboard houses substitute for the raw-plank architecture of the frontier town; an industrial bridge provides background sublimity in the absence of mountains. As always in an Eastwood western, the action takes place in an enclosed community that prefers to operate by its own rules; and as always, terrible secrets haunt the characters. Terrible wrongs are avenged and redoubled.

Of course, some viewers prefer to classify Mystic River with Eastwood's police movies; and they're not entirely wrong. In the role of Sean Devine, a detective with the Massachusetts state troopers, lean and clean-featured Kevin Bacon closely approximates one of Eastwood's own tight-lipped cops, never raising his voice, continually struggling to hold himself in. But the Eastwood detective usually pursues some taunting, demonic version of himself. Devine must contend with a pair of contrasting alter egos, both of them figures from his childhood on these streets: Jimmy Markum (Sean Penn), the big man in his little neighborhood, and Dave Boyle (Tim Robbins), who shuffles meekly around the bars and back porches and sometimes thinks he's one of the Undead.

He is, at a minimum, unfinished. That much is obvious from a square of sidewalk into which Dave and his buddies scratched their names some thirty years ago: Jimmy, Sean, Da. Now the memory of the event that interrupted Dave's hand is literally set in concrete, right on the street: the visible sign of something lost in him, something irremediably broken in the neighborhood.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.