Mystic River

In common with last week's Kill Bill, the climactic scene of Mystic River has a parent exacting violent revenge for the murder of a child. Given that its director, Clint Eastwood, has, in his time, incarnated some of the screen's most notorious vigilantes, this payback might not come as a surprise. Yet it's an indication of how far Eastwood has travelled since Dirty Harry, that vengeance in this new film is not a catharsis but part of an unending cycle of tragedy. And the reflective, almost leisurely way that the story reaches its climax renders it altogether different from the cut and thrust of Tarantino's schlocky horror show.

This isn't a violent movie, but something more subtly disquieting: a film about violence. This is immediately felt in its horrifically creepy prologue. Three 11-year-old boys are playing on the street of their blue-collar Boston Irish neighbourhood when two cops pull up; they force one of them, Dave, into the car and drive off. Suspicion that wrongdoing is afoot gradually becomes a certainty.

The two men aren't cops at all, and Dave is locked for days in a basement and suffers something unspeakable. He escapes, but what he goes through affects his friends Jimmy and Sean, too. The fallout still reverberates 30 years later, when another traumatic event shakes the neighbourhood. Jimmy (Sean Penn), a brooding ex-con and Catholic family man, is first stricken by the murder of his 19-year-old daughter, then swears vengeance on her killer. Investigating the case is his erstwhile friend Sean (Kevin Bacon), a Massachusetts homicide detective eager to nail the perpetrator before Jimmy and his crew of thugs get there. And, sharpening the irony still further, spooked, hesitant Dave (Tim Robbins) is a suspect. How come he stumbled in late with those bloodstains and bruised knuckles on the night of the girl's murder?

Another film-maker might either have dealt with the police inquiry, or concentrated on the drama that springs up around the three men. Eastwood, working from Brian Helgeland's adaptation of Dennis Lehane's novel, does both. In recent times, one has been tempted to wonder if Clint should do himself a favour and call it a day. Very little in his directorial career has been as feeble as last year's Blood Work, which followed the pedestrian efforts of Space Cowboys (2000) and True Crime (1999). A man's gotta know his limitations - as his famous cop once growled - and, entering his seventies, it looked like he'd well and truly bumped up against his. In Mystic River, however, he seems back on his game, cutting between action and interior conflict with an authority we haven't seen since Unforgiven.

He has a fine cast to help him. An actor who has always known the value of reserve and restraint, Clint seems to have communicated this to his three leads; their characters look awkward around each other, as if the mutual ghost of their past stands between them. There are no hugs when they meet again, just a wary glance of recognition. Penn has one crazed howl of anguish early on when the hard fact of his daughter's murder hits home, but for the rest of the movie he withdraws into tightly compacted grief and fury. The less-is-more principle is illustrated when he has to identify his daughter's corpse, and his quiet, resigned acknowledgment feels heartbreakingly true. As Sean's cop partner (Laurence Fishburne) observes, Jimmy's grief and pain seem bunched right into his shoulders.

The movie thrums with unspoken feeling, much of it between people who are supposed to love one another. Sean is recently separated from his wife, who still phones him yet can't find anything to say. Dave's wife, superbly played by Marcia Gay Harden, conveys a whole married life of deliberately not saying what's on her mind. When she timidly asks Dave about his damaged hand, we see straight away that her love for him is rooted not in trust, but fear, hugely amplified in the scene where Dave tries to explain a vampire movie as if it might provide a clue to his wretchedness. (He knows too well what a human predator is capable of).

Of the three men, Tim Robbins is the least well cast, his lumbering gait and scared-rabbit eyes are at odds with his physical presence, and the plot doesn't help in fingering him almost instantly as a suspect. The pathos is spiked by a chilling note in its conclusion, struck with calculated intent by Jimmy's wife (Laura Linney), hitherto a quite marginal character. Her righteous assurances to her husband have the ring of Lady Macbeth, and stir up a dark, clannish mood that one had scarcely noted gathering at the film's edge. Jimmy, having tried once to escape the culture of violence, now seems to accept that it will never let him be. The silent glances that pass from character to character at the close hint that battle lines have been redrawn and scores remain to be settled. The Irish don't forget that easily.

Eastwood fits it all together with a masterful economy and furnishes his own atmospheric score for good measure. After a sequence of duds, this serious, grown-up piece of work suggests that his film-making may be on the verge of a late bloom.