Cinematic Elements In Clint Eastwood's Mystic River

At the beginning of Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, Dave Boyle is a normal young boy growing up in Boston, Massachusetts. The movie begins as all classic Hollywood narratives begin, with a clear equilibrium and a well established social order. Dave and his friends are seen as happy kids, playing a game of hockey in the street, laughing and smiling. Everything is normal and, moreover, everything is good, what Stephen Neale would describe as “a condition of total plenitude.” It’s a scene that can be witnessed nearly anywhere, when the weather is right and the world is quiet but for the sound of children playing, and everything seems safe and steady. In the sense of equilibrium being established, Mystic River definitely follows the classic Hollywood narrative.

In the style of classic Hollywood narratives, Mystic River’s story is pushed along by a mysterious force that sets out to create a disequilibrium within it. The children lose their ball and then, as if their eyes are following the invisible string of the storyline, they see a block of wet cement on the sidewalk. This cement block becomes an engine of the enigma, a tool it uses. The enigma itself is a child

molester posing as a police officer, who kidnaps Dave Boyle before he can finish writing his name in the cement. The equilibrium is taken away as Dave is, and what’s left is chaos as the other children run to tell their fathers, who immediately see the holes in the so called police officer’s story. The disequilibrium is punctuated by the scene of Dave’s escape, with shaky camera movement, shadows everywhere, and eerie music reminiscent of a horror movie playing in the background. You can’t get much farther from the initial equilibrium than that.
In a way that isn’t typical of the classic Hollywood narrative as explained by Neale, the story reopens, now with a new sense of equilibrium, on those same young boys, only now they’re not boys, they’re adults with children and lives all their own. The equilibrium seems to return with Dave, just as it was taken away with him. Once again, social order and plenitude are returned. Things aren’t quite as happy as they were when Dave was a child, but there is an undeniable sense of order and rightness. We see each character going about their lives as usual and, although they aren’t perfect, especially, it seems, in the case of Sean Divine, they’re balanced and normal.
In Genre, Stephen Neale describes the instance of the dissent into disequilibrium as being different genre to genre.

In this second jump from balanced to unbalanced, it fits more with Neale’s description of the detective genres, which is a genre Mystic River could easily be filed under. “For example,” Neale states, “in the western, the gangster film and detective film disruption is always figured literally – as physical violence.” In Mystic River the physical violence that initiates this second disequilibrium is the brutal murder of Katie Markum, the daughter of one of the boys from the start of the film, Jimmy Markum, who had been somewhat of a leader of the children. The enigma is a mystery, though the film hits at the now grown-up Dave Boyle, who has been severely affected by his childhood

abuses.
Dave Boyle’s character is one irreparably and entirely changed by his trauma, doomed to relive it every day as he walks through the neighborhood. As young Jimmy says about their names written in the cement, “now it’ll be there forever,” and the same is true of Dave’s anguish. Mystic River seems to spend most of the movie moving towards Dave being Katie Markum’s killer, all the evidence gathered is damning against him and even outside of the evidence, within his interactions with those around him; Dave seems to be a believable suspect.
Tim Robbins’ portrayal of Dave Boyle is masterful, every motion and tick, every verbal nuance, the mostly deadpanned but still pained facial expression he holds throughout most of the movie, it all fits Dave to a T. Although Tim Robbins is a rather large man, David Boyle seems small, seems childlike and pained and weighted down by experiences. He keeps his voice low and almost monotone; the way he speaks is almost like a child. He’s a man haunted, or, as he sees it, a man dead, a vampire, dead but yet living.
There’s a line in the movie, during the chaotic scene after Dave is taken, someone says, “Damaged goods. Even if they find him alive, he’ll never be the same.” Whoever said this was spot on, as Dave is never the same as he was when he was young, never so jovial or care-free. Dave lives in that basement they took him to, he lives in that night, those moments when he was first taken, those four days. Dave, the real Dave, died in that basement. And, according to Dave himself, “Dave’s dead. I don’t know who came out of that cellar but it sure as shit wasn’t Dave.” He explains, “It’s like vampires, once it’s in you, it stays.” And it does stay, for the rest of his life. Dave can’t even remember having a childhood, his innocence and those sweet years of happiness were taken from him violently. Dave explains himself perfectly as he reads a story to his son, and it would be criminal not to include the passage:
The boy who’d escaped from wolves. An animal of the dusk. Invisible. silent. Living in a world others never saw, a world of fireflies. Unseen except as a flare in the corner of your eye. Vanished by the time you turned your head toward it. I just need to get my head right. Catch a nice long sleep and the boy will go back to his forest. Back to his fireflies.
Dave is a tortured soul, haunted by the boy he used to be, who had escaped from the ‘wolves,’ the molesters who kidnapped him. Now he feels lost in the adult world, and as though he had no childhood. He’s a vampire, a corpse of the boy he used to be, the boy who died in the cellar, reanimated and possessed by someone desperately pretending to be that boy.
It’s this nagging trauma, this altered perception, which make Dave an easy suspect. He’s suspicious in just the way he acts, vulnerable, distant, guarded, awkward and strange, you know, “a nice guy, quiet.” And, with the rate of people who are sexually abused eventually becoming predators themselves so high, it just seems likely that Dave is Katie’s killer. Therefore, the second enigma seems to be Dave, as if that’s the ending the movie is leading up to, the coup de grâce. As we find out, a bit late to save Dave, Katie’s killer was not in fact the former victim of child abuse at all. Dave did kill, but the murder he really committed made much more sense in the context of his back-story. He felt he had to save the boy in the woods, the boy running from the wolves. So he did what he wished had been done for him, he took the wolf down and the boy was able to run away, to the fireflies.
This second enigma, once we figure out that it was not in fact Dave as the movie had led us to believe, turns out to be, big twist here, the not-so-mute brother of the boy in love with Katie Markum and his best friend. This information is found out by the closest thing to a hero agent Mystic River has, Sean Devine. It comes as somewhat of a surprise to everyone, including the audience, but especially Jimmy Markum, who had already executed an innocent Dave Boyle for the murder of his daughter.
While the classic Hollywood narrative is supposed to have a return to equilibrium, Mystic River only half accomplishes this. Golden boy Sean Devine’s wife returns with their infant child, a girl, returning equilibrium to his life. Jimmy Markum, although extremely depressed over the loss of his daughter and distraught over murdering his innocent old friend, Dave Boyle, seems to find his own equilibrium as he returns to his role of leader of the pack. His wife justifies his actions for him, and Dave’s body has been disposed of, so life, for Jimmy, seems to have found a new equilibrium – certainly not as balanced as the last but there all the same. Celeste Boyle and Dave Boyle’s son, however, shatter what may have been a return to equilibrium. Their lives are still in terrible chaos, entrenched in disequilibrium. Her husband, and her son’s father, has been brutally murdered and is now gone to them forever. What’s worse, for Celeste, she was a catalyst to her husband’s death. If she hadn’t suspected him and expressed her concerns to Jimmy, it’s likely that he never would have killed Dave. Even Annabeth Markum, Jimmy’s wife, says that what Celeste did, betraying her husband, was disgraceful. The movie closes on the parade, on Celeste and her son entrenched in sadness, on Jimmy Markum returning to his place as king of the hoodlums, on Sean Devine and his wife and daughter, holding each other close, happy.
Although Mystic River has many elements of the classic Hollywood narrative, it doesn’t quite fit it. There are two instances of equilibrium, two instances of disequilibrium, and there is no true return to equilibrium. If the classic Hollywood narrative requires a happy Hollywood ending then Mystic River does not qualify, as Mystic River only seemed to have half a happy ending, and even then it was bittersweet – sad people putting on brave faces. The story also doesn’t quite have that ‘hero agent’ Neale looks for. There’s no true hero doing impossible things (unless you count Kevin Bacon catching that one tiny little line that broke the case). So, though Mystic River contains crucial elements of the classic Hollywood narrative, it doesn’t quite follow it enough so that I would be comfortable referring to it as such.