Mystic River at 20: How Clint Eastwood took on the dark side

With the 20th anniversary of ‘Mystic River’ next year, Geoffrey Macnab looks beyond Eastwood’s ‘Dirty Harry’ persona, and says, the filmmaker was prepared to venture into areas where other directors were far too terrified to tread

Sean Penn picked up Best Actor Oscar for his fiery performance as the small-time criminal Jimmy Markum in Clint Eastwood’s 2003 film ‘Mystic River’ (Moviestore/Shutterstock)

You don’t generally turn to Clint Eastwood for subtlety or moral complexity. He is best known for making films about heroes and anti-heroes. Whether as Dirty Harry in Don Siegel’s 1971 film or the man with no name in Sergio Leone’s “Dollars Trilogy” of Spaghetti Western films, his most famous roles on screen have been as vengeful cops or vigilante cowboys. As a director, he has often told stories featuring American everyman types; the courageous airline pilot “Sully” in his 2016 film of the same name and the patriotic and heroic US Marines in Flags of Our Fathers (2006), or about the country’s more shady figures, such as twisted FBI head J Edgar Hoover, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, in the 2011 biopic, J. Edgar.

That is why Mystic River (2003) seems such an anomaly in Eastwood’s filmography. The Boston-set movie is a study of guilt, dread, and ambiguity. Its main characters are all deeply flawed and haunted by their own past failures and missteps. For once in an Eastwood film, most of the violence takes place off-screen. Nonetheless, this ranks as surely the director’s darkest, most disturbing feature. It won two Oscars. Sean Penn picked up Best Actor for his fiery performance as the small-time criminal Jimmy Markum who takes the law into his own hands after his 19-year-old daughter is killed. Tim Robbins won Best Supporting Actor as Jimmy’s childhood friend, Dave Boyle, who was kidnapped and sexually abused as a kid.

Mystic River was back in the news recently when Penn gave one of his two Oscars – he won another for Milk in 2008 – to the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in a gesture of solidarity with Ukraine during its ongoing war with Russia. With its 20th anniversary fast approaching, the film is bound to receive yet more attention in the coming months. So where does it stand in the Eastwood canon?