Jeremy’s Tophunder №91: Mystic River

7 min readMay 6, 2020

Movies from 2003 have a rather interesting place in my memory. That was the first year that I really cared about the Oscars. I can’t remember whether it was my mother or father, but one of them had an Oscars pool in their office, where you would pick winners in each category, and the bigger categories were worth more points, and the winner took home the prize. In 2004 (so, awarding movies from 2003), I think I either won the pool or came damn close.

I must have always known that the Oscars were a thing, but I can’t quite remember the first time I heard about them. I have some recollection of The Fellowship of The Ring (in 2001) being the first movie that I can remember where TV advertisements specifically referenced its Oscar nominations, and me thinking to myself “oh, that means it must be a good movie, I’m glad I like that movie.” The 2003 slate was the first time I ever remember going to the movies specifically because those movies were nominated for Oscars.

I went to a lot of movies that awards season. I saw all five Best Picture nominees, I saw Cold Mountain (which was nominated for seven Oscars, but not Best Picture), I saw 21 Grams (which had two acting nominations for Naomi Watts and Benecio Del Toro), I saw Pirates of the Caribbean (which inexplicably got five nominations), and a few others that were nominated in the “prestige” categories (acting, writing, or directing). I was 14, and it was the first year that I was allowed to go to R-rated movies, so long as they were nominated for major awards and one of my parents went with me.

I remember thinking that Mystic River was incredible. I wanted to pick it to win all of the Oscars it was nominated for, and at the time I thought it deserved them, too. I didn’t fully grasp the concept that Lord of the Rings: Return of the King was an unstoppable freight train, largely because the last movie in the series was being awarded in part for the excellence of the entirety of the series. I thought Mystic River was a better movie, so it deserved to win. I was eventually talked into picking Lord of the Rings for most of the categories it was nominated for, but I still stuck up for Mystic River, picking it to win all three acting categories it was nominated for. It ended up winning two — Sean Penn in Best Actor and Tim Robbins in Best Supporting Actor. Marcia Gay Harden didn’t win for Best Supporting Actress, which I’m still a little bitter about, if we’re being honest.

But I was 14 years old, and I took down a group of intellectual adults in an Oscars pool. I still can’t remember if I actually won or not, and I can’t remember who’s office pool it was, but my father is a lawyer and my mother is a college professor, so I feel like whoever’s office it was, was probably full of some reasonably cultured people. It was a big deal to me at the time. And for better or worse, it spurred an obsession with the Oscars that (to some extent) continues to this day.

Are the Oscars worth being obsessed with? No. Objectively not. They get it wrong a staggering amount of the time. Al Pacino didn’t win an Oscar playing Michael Corleone in Godfather I or Godfather II. Robert De Niro didn’t win an Oscar for Taxi Driver. Dances With Wolves won Best Picture and Best Director over Goodfellas. The King’s Speech won both awards over The Social Network. If you go through past Oscar winners, it seems like every year there is a winner in one category or another that seems absolutely bewildering in hindsight. Sometimes you don’t even need much hindsight — barely a year ago, there were enough members of the Academy who decided that Green Book was the best movie of the year. But, they’re what we have. Like any subjective awards given to works of art, they’re going to get a few wrong, and people are going to laugh at them after the fact (and sometimes laugh at them in real time). But sometimes they also get them right, and you take the good with the bad, because there really isn’t a better option out there.

The 2004 Oscars (again, awarding 2003 movies — this has always confused me) mostly got it right. I actually think Sean Penn’s performance is one of the best of the last 20 years or so, up there with Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood, Christoph Waltz in Inglorious Basterds, Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men, and J.K. Simmons in Whiplash. (Not sure if this is a coincidence or not, but three of those guys were in “supporting” roles, according to the Academy — for some reason I’m more intrigued by smaller roles that become magnified by spectacular performances.) The scene in the park when Penn is trying to find out if his daughter has been murdered is one of the best scenes I’ve ever seen an actor give.

Re-watching the movie in 2020, though, the editing of the scene kind of annoys me a little bit — it bothers me how much time we spend looking at Kevin Bacon, who is just standing there, mostly expressionless, while Sean Penn is going out of his mind with grief and rage. I -want- to see Sean Penn during this scene. I want the camera fixed on him, and I don’t fully understand why we keep cutting back to Bacon. It doesn’t seem to serve either character all that well, and if anything, it robs us of part of Penn’s great performance.

Ultimately, it’s one of the reasons that I’m a little conflicted about Mystic River. It combines three of my favorite acting performances of all time (Penn, Robbins, and Harden), but it also features a truly dismal performance from Laura Linney (which sounds shocking to say), a perfectly average performance from Kevin Bacon, and a hit-or-miss performance from Laurence Fishburne (who is great in a few scenes and pretty bad in others).

It’s one of the problems I often have with Clint Eastwood-directed movies. He’s famous for working quickly, and as soon as one take is good enough, he moves on to whatever’s next. The result is an efficient production schedule, but also maybe some lackluster acting performances. A lot of Eastwood movies leave me wondering if the acting performances were all that they could be. At the same time, though, there have been plenty of high-profile actors that have said they enjoy his way of working and speak highly of him. Mystic River certainly offers both ends of the spectrum.

Beyond acting, Mystic River has a lot of things going for it. It’s a murder mystery set in Boston (so it’s right up my alley), it’s a tight story that moves well, it has an easy and smooth visual aesthetic, and it poses a lot of lingering questions about the nature of abuse, justice, power, and loss. It’s a movie I’ve loved a lot since I first saw it almost 20 years ago, but with every re-watching, little, nit-pick complaints start to gnaw at me. I wish the movie was cut just slightly differently, to highlight the better acting performances and sweep the less impressive ones under the rug. I wish we got more backstory about Sean Penn’s character, and a clearer picture of how much power we’re supposed to assume he is able to wield around the neighborhood. I wish we got more time with Emmy Rossum’s character. Really, though, they’re all very minor changes, and I like the movie a lot just the way it is. It’s not a perfect movie, and maybe not even all that close to perfect, but it’s still really, really good, and my 91st-favorite movie of all time.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One