Mystic River

Mystic River, directed by Clint Eastwood, is a whodunit which takes time out for quieter interludes.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

JULIE MYERSON:
I think this is a measured, muscular film about the terrible damage caused by a single act of random violence. I came to it as you should come to all films, knowing nothing that you could know. I didn't expect anything. It was probably the most gripping first 40 minutes of a film that I can remember watching.

TOM SUTCLIFFE:
Tom Paulin did you come clean to it as well?

TOM PAULIN:
I knew nothing about it. Absolutely extraordinary, I agree with Julie. It had a visceral tragic power. I found it very, very upsetting at times, the anxiety it releases in you as you watch. Extraordinary, marvellous, one or two things wrong with it, the detectives estranged wife, the phone calls, not sure about some bit of the ending. But an extraordinary film, remarkable.

TOM SUTCLIFFE:
It takes up the thing, a crucially important thing for Clint Eastwood as a director which is violence and how it works. Did you have anxieties about that, he's been criticised with it in the past, the way he deals with it?

ALKARIM JIVAN:
I'm not a fan of Clint Eastwood movies, the strong, silent types going through male rights of passage. But this is different. It's about a powerful exploration of power and violence. But there is something else. It provides a counterpoint to his earlier work. Eastwood is known throughout the '70s and the '80s and the guy who made ultra-violent movies, to the extent they described him as being a machine for killing. Now this one is very, very different. Sure, the violence is in there, but it's hidden off- stage. It happens off-screen.

TOM SUTCLIFFE:
Not all of it?

ALKARIM JIVAN:
Large chunks of it. For instance it's a murder mystery; for example we don't actually see the murder. The bigger point is that his moral world view has changed. Whereas in the past revenge and killing was what made men, men. Here he is saying vengeance is pointless, even worse:
it's endless.

TOM SUTCLIFFE:
I'm not sure it's entirely pointless, apart from the major sell for this film, it has three terrific actors?

JULIE MYERSON:
I thought they were fantastically well-realised characters. It was actually based on a novel but it had the depth of a novel, but perhaps the pace of a movie sometimes. There were problems, they tried to give Kevin Bacon's police character a past. All you saw were shots of a woman calling him. The film didn't earn that.

TOM SUTCLIFFE:
There is a moment of Forgiveness which is missing in some other elements?

TOM PAULIN:
He has mellowed and so on. Absolutely. But it's about community, what goes with living in a community. What is terrible about community. Sean Penn is absolutely brilliant. I think, he is a centrally powerful and more and more tortured and more and more the central character, although there are three central characters in it. But it's the visceral power that I have not felt in a film for a long time. It never loses it which is a very unusual thing in a Hollywood film.

TOM SUTCLIFFE:
There are three strong women, one is almost invisible. Did you have any anxieties, the role of the women, that they are loyal to their men?

JULIE MYERSON:
I thought that in the film it was absolutely right. It was Marcia Gay Harden, the journey she goes through was utterly convincing. The depth of the character, you knew what the last ten years had been like for her. The film did that for you.