When I saw the opening of the story, I couldn't help but think of another film "The Sleeper", which also has a first-class cast and also originated from the theme of "child sexual abuse". But after watching "Mystic River", you will understand that "The Sleeper" has the addition of Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, but it still can't conceal its lack of depth in the plot, and it will eventually become a one. Exquisite commercial films with no formality are more entertaining than discussing topics. By comparison, you will also understand the depth of the exploration of the gloomy human nature in "The River of Mystery".
Story:
Three little boys, Jimmy, Dave and Sean, were playing a ball in the block on a gray afternoon, but the ball rolled into the gutter. The three of them were bored and wrote their names on a piece of finished concrete. The two men pretended to be the police and took away Dave, so the nightmare and pain of the whole film began at this moment.
The camera moves back to the same town, and the time is fixed 25 years later. The three little boys of the past have grown up and all have their own lives, but they have lost contact with each other. Under the calm and watery life, there seems to be a vaguely unstable undercurrent surging, which seems to rush out of the surface at a certain moment. In the early hours of the morning, a murder case happened as if a bomb exploded the originally calm water surface, and all the darkness that was originally hidden under the water suddenly surfaced with the undercurrent.
The three childhood playmates who had never had anything to do with each other began to be linked together by this case. Jimmy is distraught at the murder of his 19-year-old daughter, Katie, and confesses that he wants to avenge her daughter himself. Dave looked strange because of the blood that night, and at the same time filled his wife with fear and anxiety. As the police officer in charge of investigating the case, Sean began to search for all kinds of clues, and at the same time he was affected by discordance in his family life from time to time.
In the end, the undercurrents hidden behind everyone make the story develop in distortion, so that the increasing darkness makes everything come to a tragic end. This is indeed not the ending that I like. Even though the director gave a little sunshine, it is still full of coldness in my eyes.
Analysis: The
film has certain suspenseful features, and the investigation of the murderer is also a clue to the development of the plot. Therefore, with the development of the plot, there are techniques to deliberately guide the audience to guess in the wrong direction. Therefore, during the whole process of watching the film, I was initially guided by the plot to doubt Dave's murder possibility. But gradually I realized that this was just misleading. In fact, which one of the murderers was not what the film wanted to say the most, he was just a lead to detonate the darkness and pain behind everyone, and alternately with reality in the past to outline the most real side of a person. .
In this film, Eastwood used the usual simple way to shoot, and did not use too many techniques to interpret it. The control of the whole film is very calm, and you can see the same unforgiving but extremely effective lens language in "Unforgivable". At the moment when the truth comes to light in the last ten minutes of the film, although the two lines alternately go hand in hand, although it is a bit cliché, it still plays a significant role in expressing a certain shock.
When Jimmy lost his beloved daughter at the beginning of the film, a painful and tolerant father seemed to be worthy of sympathy, and his screams seemed to be able to evoke the audience's tears. But when hatred slowly accumulates in the heart to take hold of the whole soul, this person who has corrected the evil and reformed back to the old path and adopted violence to avenge his daughter, thus going to extremes and making a big mistake. After watching the whole film, I realized that Dave is actually the most sympathetic person in this film. As Dave himself said in the film, "The real Dave has gone with the car since he was a teenager. The Dave who escaped is no longer the original Dave. The current Dave is just possessed. Body."
The concrete pavement with the names of three teenagers is often inserted in the film. Dave's unfinished name seems to foreshadow a broken life and a life without a future. The assaulted youth made his life distorted ever since, and we always see his blank expressionless face as an adult. There was hardly a smile on his face, his eyebrows were always tightly closed and full of autism, and he could not get rid of that childhood nightmare in his entire life. He can't even communicate with his wife, and his wife's fear and his panic has planted the bane of his life. Sean is caught in a family dilemma and can't help himself, always wandering between life and work. But he seems to be outside the whole tragedy, just as the discoverer of the truth, linking the other two.
The film seems to have another tragic reincarnation. In the past, Jimmy once killed "Justice Thunder" and sent $500 a month to his family. But his daughter fell in love with Lei's son and died at the hands of Lei's other two sons. Dave was assaulted as a child, and his whole life was shrouded in the shadow of nightmares. One day, when he met a man who had sex with a boy in a car, he had a vengeful heart and killed him. Wrong to die for another reason. In fact, Dave was destroyed by that nightmare a long time ago and lived like a walking dead. He only learned about this nightmare again after a few years. At the end of the film, in front of the Sunshine Parade, the Jimmy and his wife seemed to recover from their grief. Everything seemed to have begun to emerge from the darkness, but I wonder if Jimmy will return to another cycle because of his own mistakes? In the sun, I only heard Dave’s wife looking for Dave in the parade, and calling her son desolately.
Performance: The
film "Mystic River" revolves around the story of three men, and the woman is just a foil. This also seems to suit the taste of the big Western movie star Eastwood, and his films are always full of masculinity. Looking down, you will understand that the acting skills of the three male protagonists are far more famous than their reputations. If you need to make an analogy, the three of them are like Huang Qiusheng, Wu Zhenyu and Liu Qingyun in the Hong Kong film circle. Of course, they are only equivalent. Yu's metaphor is just to show that although they are not first-line stars, they are not inferior or even stronger than the first-line stars. Of course, acting skills may not make a film, but it can make an in-depth film more successful.
In the whole play, Sean Penn and Tim Robbins played more important roles, and they also brought two statuettes to these two powerful movie stars. Sean Penn’s interpretation of Jimmy’s impulse, forbearance, and hatred is three-pointer. The conflict scenes of eagerness to understand the truth after the death of his daughter has been regarded as the focus of this play, but in fact it is Sean Penn’s performance in the past is that his tolerance of grief after the death of his daughter is very tense. When this tolerance is transformed into hatred, his controlled outbreak is also quite good. Tim Robbins' performance is actually not inferior to Sean Penn. He is always in a state of silence, always looking melancholy and uneasy, and sometimes seems like sleepwalking. I always feel that Tim Robbins's performance is almost focused on his always frowning brows, combined with void eyes, dull expressions and slow movements. It makes people feel that he is always in a kind of darkness, and the gloom always surrounds him.
And Kevin Bacon’s character is not shrouded in the gloom of the past like the other two male characters. He is more trapped in a real family crisis. He is always talking on the phone with his invisible wife. Shows a kind of frustration and helplessness. In addition, it is mainly to set off the performance of the other two.
Because it is basically a male drama, the roles of the other two powerful female characters are relatively less crowded. But there is still something remarkable, especially the wife of Dave played by Marcia Gay Harden, who has been in a state of fear and anxiety for a long time, eager to communicate with her husband, but afraid to communicate with him. She is a woman who lacks independent opinions, and she is so worried that she dare not face her husband's flustered words and abnormal behavior. Suspiciously guessing that it directly affected the tragedy, I can see the same sadness and misfortune as Dave in the role she played. The wife of Jimmy, played by another actress, Laura Linney, has relatively fewer scenes and does not play a key role in the whole show. But in the final scene of the opponent scene with Jimmy, she can show a very scheming woman. As the stepmother of the dead daughter, she seems to be more interested in letting her husband transfer her energy to her own daughter.
dark:
This kind of movie is dark enough, and Eastwood expresses the black gloomy feeling of the Mystic River and the crowded blue-collar community by the river very well. Someone once said that the movie made the feeling of Boston. The successful environment shaping makes the entire environment and the inner performance of the characters seem to be in contrast to each other, and it becomes increasingly dark and abnormal.
The shadows of childhood are only flickering and appearing in fragmented and scattered shots, and can't disappear in real life. The concrete pavement with the name of the young man was telling an indelible pain. The pain filled the depths of the soul, letting the sunlight linger. I don't like stories like this. During the two hours of watching the movie, the darkness was so tight that I couldn't breathe. I just want to escape, thinking of an exit, but the story ends and the movie ends. It didn't give me an exit, I just need time to resolve it slowly.
I just hope that the story will only remain in the movie, and I don't want it to enter my life. I still like more sunshine.
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