Mystic River | Clint Eastwood
SPOILER ALERT
The end of this movie destroyed me.
It ate away at me enough that I needed 1,000 episodes of Schittz Creek, SpongeBob, New Girl, and a few viewings of Pride & Prejudice to restore all my emotional tissue. Please don’t read in too deeply what this combination of media says of me.
The level of misunderstanding and judgement around mental health and childhood trauma, the ripping sentiments of a Father who has lost his daughter to murder, and the in-explainable head nods of the final scene, that to my eyes justified the taking-the-law-in-my-own-hands actions, was just so much. I know films are not required to capture healing and ownership and forgiveness like a therapeutic session breakthrough, but what happened to Tim Robbin’s Dave felt like the already taught thread of a man’s trauma, who’s inability to communicate himself clearly stemmed from the abuse of a kidnapping and hostage, being pulled to the point of break. That break was another man’s grief choosing a gun shot to find relief and justice in a false accusation. The two close friends, close witnesses to Dave’s teetering deterioration, shrugged and avoided it over the course of the film, suggesting this was over their life’s friendship. His trauma was not their’s to fix of course, and they shrugged in tender regard-ish? but it seemed some unspoken rule to keep that moment in time buried and trapped where some therapy would have probably been quite helpful.
Sometimes the most cringey is the most powerful for reflection and asking hard questions, and when I think about delight, this is a film that needed to be nestled in the context of shared libations with friends or a warm cookie…not a one person quarantined evening viewing with no cookies from the couch circa May 2020. Delight seems most precious in the moments you neither expect nor plan for it, but I wonder if planning in fact creates room for the hard moments to exist within tissue as a delight-like appreciation, so nothing gets eaten away without permission. Then maybe I can delight in the great acting or directing, instead of thinking the worst of Jimmy Marcus. Sean Penn really did do a terrific job though.
[Book of Delights p. 95 | No. 31 Ghost]