Play Mystic for me

Rarely has there been a film so subtly yet inexorably suffused with guilt as Clint Eastwood's latest movie.

Based on Dennis Lehane's 2001 novel, it is a film of magisterial, slow-burning power, one of the finest examples of recent American cinematic storytelling and certainly Eastwood's most mature film.

In a brief prologue, set three decades or so before the action, three young boys are playing in the streets of a blue-collar Boston neighbourhood. As they scratch their names in the sidewalk's wet cement, a car pulls up.

The two occupants claim to be policemen who give the miscreants a stern ticking off before persuading one of the boys, Dave, into the back of the car. He is then imprisoned and sexually abused for four days.

In the present day, the three former pals have drifted apart, but still live cheek by jowl in the same neighbourhood. Jimmy Markum (Sean Penn), a volatile family man who runs the grocery store, spent time in jail for robbery but is now an upstanding member of the community.

Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon) is a forlorn cop whose pregnant wife has walked out and now ritually telephones him without uttering a word. The saddest, though, is Dave Boyle (Tim Robbins) whose traumatic abuse has left him doubtful and insecure; impoverished and drifting, he is beset by fears which cause
chronic anxiety in his wife Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden).

When Jimmy's eldest daughter goes missing one night and is later found murdered, the scene is set for the past to intrude on the present, for buried guilt to resurface and for a tragic and horrendous destiny of misdirected vengeance to play out.

Guilt, at first vague and formless, slowly comes into focus as the murder investigation proceeds. The toll of the intervening years is revealed in snatches of dialogue and shifting human geography.

Of all the characters, Jimmy carries the heaviest psychological burden - literally represented by the huge black cross tattooed on his back, a symbolic echo of a cross seen earlier in the film. His natural instinct as an adult to protect his friends and family; his flaw and vulnerability remains his failure to have protected Dave as a child.

Eastwood's directorial style is discreet. Apart from one or two virtuoso shots - the camera wheeling above the griefstricken Jimmy, for example, as he is held back by cops and friends when he hears of his daughter's death - we are unaware of the film being "directed" at all. Eastwood is the antithesis of the successor generation of filmmakers such as Scorsese and Tarantino, for whom style is paramount.