ll right, consider my lesson learned. While intellectually realizing that movies adapted from outstanding novels shouldn't be blamed for not being "as good" as the books upon which they are based, prior to viewing Mystic River I still unaccountably indulged in a sort of literary snobbery when it came to Hollywoodizations of my favorite novels. And Mystic River, by Dennis Lehane, definitely qualifies as one of my favorite novels. Rich in character development, loaded with interesting but never irrelevant subplots, propelled by an absorbing central narrative that practically defined "tragic realism", and absolutely nailing the essence of my home city of Boston, it was one of those books that I half-hoped, half-feared would be turned into a movie. The hope was based on the prospect of seeing those same characters, plots, and setting skillfully brought to life on the big screen. The fear was, of course, based on long experience. Hollywood rarely gets the soul of a book just right, and more to the point, film as a medium has difficulty conveying the rich detail and complex narratives that characterize "epic" books, a description that fit Mystic River to a tee. So, even though the movie was in the hands of a veteran craftsman like Clint Eastwood, I was expecting a well-made bastardization at most.

For roughly the first half of the movie, my fears were proving justified. Despite a stellar cast and quality direction, something was missing. The Shakespearan quality that had elevated the book far above your standard detective novel was nowhere to be found. What we had was a bunch of vaguely interesting characters following the outlines of the plot, but with little apparent soul to hold the story together. Had you peeked into the theater at around the forty-five minute mark, you would have found me with arms smugly crossed and one eye raised disapprovingly, archly satisifed that Hollywood had once again proven itself incapable of dealing with quality literature.

And then Kevin Bacon discovered the body of Jimmy's daughter, and Mystic River suddenly became a great movie After this point, Eastwood found his thematic sweet spot and the film took off into the stratosphere. Despite some minor caveats, I unexpectedly found myself completely enraptured during the second half of the movie and positively floored by the time it ended. Mystic River, after a slow start, reminded me once and for all of film's power to enhance and complement literature, rather than just ape it. Would that this ability was used more often... but I digress.

The plot of Mystic River is the stuff of classic Greek tragedy. At the beginning of the film, three young boys are shown playing on the streets of a working-class area of Boston. The boys, named Sean, Jimmy, and Dave, decide to etch their names on a slab of wet concrete on the sidewalk. Big mistake. Two men posing as cops come along, threaten the boys with arrest for vandalism, and then demand they get into their "police" car. Sean and Jimmy stand fast, but Dave acquiesces, only to be spirited away by the two men, who turn out to be pedophiles on the prowl, and taken to a remote cabin in the woods and abused for four days before he can escape.

Thirty-some years later, the boys are grown up and deeply troubled. Sean (Kevin Bacon) is a homicide detective whose wife has just left him (the film is a little weak on providing a reason), Jimmy (Sean Penn) is an ex-con now running the corner store in the old neighborhood, and Dave (Tim Robbins) hides his emotional scars behind the veneer of a regular, if oddly withdrawn, working stiff. One night, Jimmy's teenage daughter goes out drinking with her friends and simply disappears. That same night, Dave comes home cut up, covered with blood, and with an implausible story about a mugger that he feeds to his shocked (and initially credulous) wife, who in the interests of protecting her husband neglects to inform the police. The next day, Sean is assigned to the case of Jimmy's missing daughter and shortly thereafter finds her mutilated body in the middle of a park. You see where this is going, right? As Sean pursues his investigation, he gradually comes to realize that Dave's shifting stories about his damaged hand, not to mention his whereabouts on the night of the murder, are inconsistent and ultimately unbelievable. His old buddy becomes suspect number one, at least in the mind of Sean's bulldog partner Whitey (Laurence Fishburne). Meanwhile, Jimmy's grief over his daughter's violent end slowly transforms into a desire for vigilante justice, bringing him closer to his former criminal connections. As the investigation continues, the old friends' lives become inextricably intertwined, and the past rears its ugly head.

As I said, this is Shakespearean stuff, and Bacon, Penn, and Robbins are the kinds of actors who can and do elevate the police procedural story to its appropriately epic emotional heights. Much of the critical praise of Mystic River has been aimed at Penn's portrayal of the ex-con whose grief-fuelled rage leads him to abandon his reformed ways, but with all due respect to Penn's fine performance, it is Tim Robbins who in a sense anchors the movie. The mystery surrounding Dave, both in terms of his actual physical whereabouts on the night of the murder and the emotionally ravaged psyche he has as a result of his childhood molestation, is the central question of the film, and Robbins gets Dave's complexity exactly right. While essentially a decent guy, Dave has deeply rooted scars, and the actor must make the audience believe that his otherwise laid-back character is perfectly capable of the kind of rage that would lead to the murder of... well, someone. Robbins pulls this paradox off with ease, particularly in an Oscar-worthy scene where he turns on his wife (Marcia Gay Harden) with animal ferocity and ruminates on his abused past while she sits back, suddenly terrified of her previously loving husband.

There are, I am forced to admit, a few aspects in which the film's need to be narratively concise forces it to excise several of the book's important themes and plot points, and the movie suffers slightly as a result. Eastwood leaves out the class conflict (and resultant mutual suspicion) lying just below the surface of the relationship between the middle-class urbanite Sean and the working-class Jimmy and Dave, both of whom have relatively menial jobs and live in the same neighborhood where they grew up. The novel also places great emphasis on Dave's internal battle over whether he will inevitably succumb to abuse's tragic cycle by himself becoming a pedophile. Eastwood, unfortunately, strips this element out. And most problematically, when Mystic River finally does show us how Dave received those cuts and became covered in blood on the night of Jimmy's daughter's murder, it does so almost distractedly. In the novel, Dave's actual actions that night were an essential plot point and helped elevate the tragic nature of the story. In the movie, however, Eastwood literally devotes about ten seconds to what should be a profoundly explanatory scene. As a result, when the movie finally solves the overarching mystery of what Dave did the night of the murder, it feels not relevatory, but merely perfunctory.

But overall, Eastwood directs Mystic River brilliantly. It is clear he "gets" the essence of Dennis Lehane's story, and he has always been at his best working within the genre of tragic realism (for proof, check out both his classic Unforgiven and the great A Perfect World, made back in those halcyon days when Kevin Costner still made good career choices). And the troika of Kevin Bacon, Sean Penn, and Tim Robbins infuse their characters with the rich complexity that a story of this kind demands. Yeah, it starts off kind of slow, but this is one case in which a film approaches the greatness of a truly remarkable piece of literature. To which I can only say, mea culpa.