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James Lipton Couldn't Contain Himself
Clint Eastwood directs his adaptations of novels a bit like
Paul Auster prose. Both find profundity in murder mysteries,
which eventually become not about the search for killer or
motive, but about Big Questions. The style is spare, meandering—it
takes a while to warm up an Eastwood movie or Auster novel.
When this works, then the art is called a "meditation";
when it doesn't, it's called "pseudo-profound drivel."
Personally, I'm not much impressed by Paul Auster—the
sparse prose comes off as a masquerade of profundity (especially
in Hand to Mouth or Moon Palace) when he somehow
manages to overwrite minimalist prose. Auster tends to bloat
his writing with Important Symbolism (moviegoers familiar
with Auster's script for 1993's The Music of Chance
will recognize this) or overwords his nothingness into the
pretentious realm of the avante-guard.
Eastwood suffers from some of the same afflictions; specifically,
the sparse style that highlights overbearing symbolism. Last
year's Blood Work featured Clint Eastwood as an old
retired cop who, believe this or not, is hired by the sister
of the woman whose heart has been transplanted into Clint's
body to investigate her very murder. Will Clint
hold up long enough to bring justice to she who gave her heart
to him? Oh my. Eastwood's style is just to set the camera
down and let the actors act, but even in this minimalist direction
there's still the overloaded symbolism to deal with. Eastwood
is wise enough not to puff up this material, but he does nothing
to temper it into something less obvious, either—the
effect, in the end, is boredom.
Too many directors over-direct otherwise great material,
but not Eastwood. When he's working from a good script, his
movie can be exhilarating—he doesn't get in the way of
plot and character. This is not to say that Eastwood does
nothing when he directs; the work is mostly done beforehand.
Here, his set, art, and production designers work with the
cinematographer (Tom Stern) to create the industrial depression
inherent to South Boston. The entire movie is filmed under
an overcast sky, which makes the movie feel like we're watching
it against a prison wall. The paint is chipping from the houses,
the cars are rusting, men drink Miller High Life because their
lives are anything but. Mystic River is about the feel
of South Boston, less a neighborhood and more of an affliction—the
movie is bookended by the names of the three main characters,
whose names are permanently etched in sidewalk concrete, not
unlike the permanent etchings in their faces, wrought by the
hardscrabble life of Southie.
Mystic River is mostly a straight-arrow narrative
whose plot navigates typical guilt/redemption themes, here
filtered through the idiosyncrasies of South Boston industrial
depression and institutionalized Catholic guilt. Eastwood
is wise to let the actors bring the characters to life with
minimal interference—and with this cast, it seems the
only choice. Eastwood never does more than three takes of
any scene, and with a trustworthy crew that includes heavyweights
like Laura Linney, Marsha Gay Harden, and Laurence Fishburne
in supporting roles, this approach is especially effective.
Too often, you can sense when a scene is "overacted,"
when method and technical command infuse an actorly coldness
into a scene. To contrast, Mystic River's performances
are tight, passionate, and urgent.
The trick for the director is to get what he needs in those
first shots. Consider a scene with Sean Penn being questioned
and consoled at the police station by Kevin Bacon and Laurence
Fishburne. Penn's daughter has just been found dead, and Penn
hunches over a table like he's been shot in the gut; his shoulders,
though, remain stiff—when the conversation turns contentious,
Penn is poised immediately for a fight. In the next scene,
Fishburne tells Bacon that he can tell immediately that Penn
had done time, "He lost his daughter—that settles
in the stomach. But prison is all in the shoulders. I can
see it in a man immediately, and it's something that never
goes away." The interplay between acting and script takes
on more layers in retrospect—all due to the invisible
hand Clint Eastwood guiding the narrative without fancy camera
tricks, just using actors as a canvas. That's the beauty of
sparse prose. There's Oscar nominations to be had by Sean
Penn, Tim Robbins, Marcia Gay Harden, and possibly Kevin Bacon—and,
if there's justice, for Clint Eastwood.
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