Mystic River (3-Disc Deluxe Edition)
August 2004 Reviewed by: Josh Barber Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

With six Academy Award nominations and two wins under its belt, Mystic River was one of the biggest films of 2003. It was re-released to theaters to celebrate its Oscar success, and now the film is available on DVD in a single-disc edition or a three-disc deluxe set.

Three childhood friends are reunited when one of them loses a daughter: Sean (Kevin Bacon) is the homicide detective working on the case, Dave (Tim Robbins) has some unexplained injuries, and Jimmy (Sean Penn) is the grieving father desperate for answers.

While the plot could have made this a two-hour episode of Law & Order, everything really came together to make Mystic River something more; the script is engaging and clever, the directing is tight, and the cast nail their performances (and their wicked "Bahstin" accents) perfectly.

Penn and Robbins really earned their Oscars here, but that is not to say that the rest of the cast doesn't deliver as well. Particularly good are Marcia Gay Harden as Dave's wife, Celeste, a woman falling apart over fear of what her husband may have done, and Laura Linney playing Jimmy's wife, Annabeth, as a cold and distant woman. But even Linney gets a chance to show some wild emotion as well. Oh, and keep an eye out for a cameo by Eli Wallach, who you'll know as "Ugly" in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

In Hollywood, cities are often interchangeable -- Montreal and Toronto have stood in for just about every major American city for a film crew looking for a cheap place to work -- but by filming mostly in and around Boston proper, Eastwood really captures the feel of the place, from the rolling green of the fens to the seedy Southie bars.

Warner Home Video has had some recurring problems with the image quality on their DVDs, but for Mystic River they really got it perfect. The film's color palette is quite monochromatic: everything looks gray and cold, which suits the dreary New England weather. Blacks and whites are both solid, and there is plenty of detail to be found, though some backgrounds get a bit soft and grainy.

Any film that is so built around pairs of people talking to each other in small rooms is necessarily going to have a quiet soundtrack, and Mystic River gives us just that. There is not much call for thunderous surround sound. The voices are all clear and distinct, if sometimes a little too quiet, and there is no hissing to throw things off.

The only extra on disc 1 (and, by extension, the only thing on the single-disc edition) is a languid commentary from Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon, who don't really offer very much, or even do a good job of filling the time. Long gaps of silence abound.

The three-disc deluxe edition is packaged in a foldout tray inside a slipcase. The placement of the discs is a bit odd, with discs 2 and 3 overlapping each other on the right-hand side of the holder. It is certainly an interesting way to get more discs in a simple package, but I don't know if it is something that's going to catch on.

Disc 2 begins with "Mystic River: Beneath the Surface," a 23-minute series of self-congratulatory interviews with the cast. It's mostly throwaway stuff, but Dennis Lehane (author of the source novel) and screenwriter Brian Helgeland discuss the adaptation process, briefly and in a good sequence. "Mystic River: From Page to Screen" follows up on that premise, giving more time to Helgeland and Lehane.

Finally we get "The Charlie Rose Show -- Interviews." Rose is a consistently skilled interviewer, and gets good information out of Eastwood, Robbins, and Bacon in lengthy interviews that range from 20 minutes to nearly an hour. If "Beneath the Surface" was useless fluff, these pieces are the real goods.

The third disc in the set is actually the film's music soundtrack, composed by Eastwood and performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus.

There was a joke that with Sean Penn and Tim Robbins in the same movie, theaters would not be allowed to show it on the right side of the screen. But Mystic River is not a political film -- just a compelling look at the life of three characters and how tragedy affects them.

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