Movie Review SSJ

Three little boys, Jimmy, Dave and Sean, were the best playmates when they were young. However, when they were ten years old, two perverted pedophiles disguised themselves as police officers, took one of them away and assaulted him over the next four days. Their lives were changed forever.

The guy in the car was Dave, the guy with the hat.

“Mystic River” was directed by Clint Eastwood after he turned 70. The three protagonists in the story have very different personalities and different life paths. Maybe the director wants to use their experiences and choices to describe the painful entanglement of human nature, and let the audience see how they struggle and eventually sink in the cage of the soul that imprisons people’s souls.

As an audience member, I can understand some of the director’s intentions, such as the ambiguity of good and evil, such as the dark flow of peaceful life, such as the nothingness of life and different interpretations. But it is hard for me to make a similar assessment with detachment. It was always Dave’s shadow moving before my eyes.

His life was so miserable. He was sexually abused as a teenager, a shadow that has haunted him ever since. He became submissive, weak, and solitary, and for twenty-five years passed like a living dead, lifeless. Finally, one day, he saves another child from being sexually abused on the street, and begins to truly come out of the shadows, but also falls into the murder of his old friend Jimmy’s daughter, and even his lover can not fully believe him.

Why does Dave admit to killing his daughter when Jimmy presses him for questioning because he mistakenly thinks Dave is the murderer?

He said: “I want to make up for my youth, which I never had. If you had got in, you would have understood.”

As he said these words, Dave’s eyes were a mixture of reluctance, despair, and endless depression and pain. But the next moment, Jimmy stabbed him in the body, and Dave’s life was over. His last words were: “I’m not ready”.

In his life, Dave had rarely had warmth. He struggled to be a good father to his young son, Michael, and a good husband to his wife, but his heart had been locked forever in the cellar of his ten years old.

Jimmy and Sean, two childhood friends, never really understood or cared for Dave. Twenty-five years ago, they stood on the road and watched Dave being led away; Twenty-five years later, they were still looking at him like this, not helping him. Although they have admitted their guilt and discussed what they would have done if they had been taken away; They even regretted their indifference, but it was hypocritical self-consolation at best.

After Dave told Jimmy loudly, “If only you’d got in the car, you’d know,” Jimmy said what was in his heart: “I didn’t get in the car.

The subtext: You’re just unlucky.

There is no sympathy, no comfort, only self-interest and selfishness. This is the most distasteful part of the story. Even if Sean, the cop, suspects that Jimmy killed Dave, all he says is, “Jimmy, you’ll have to send his family an extra bill from now on.” Even more ridiculous is the fact that Jimmy blames himself for killing Dave by mistake, and immediately after his wife delivers an infuriating exhortation, Jimmy settles into his arms and is ready to make out.

Jimmy’s wife put it this way: You are the ruler of the family. You love the family. It is understandable that you should do anything for the family and the children.

“For the family, for the children”, don’t you have to bear the consequences of killing someone? I was momentously speechless at such a magnificent and shameless confession.

So dark, so cruel. Mystic River is ostensibly about how sad it is for a 19-year-old girl to be murdered, but behind it is Dave’s story. In this story, we look at how a lovely and lively boy is persecuted and abandoned. He tries to stay alive, but is killed and forgotten, sinking to the bottom of a mysterious river.

At the end of the story, Sean and Jimmy’s family are reunited and laughing as they watch the parade of floats, with only Dave’s wife in the crowd, lost in spirit, chasing their similarly dejected son, Michael. The misfortune Dave experienced as a teenager is likely to be repeated with his son Michael. The mysterious river flows, washing away everyone’s SINS. The body sank and the past was buried. As long as it doesn’t come to the surface, no one cares about the truth.

But it was heartbreaking to think of the look in Dave’s eyes before he died, so helpless and desolate.