"Mystic River" intends to explore the irreversible impact of inevitable events on life. But the film’s weak characterization and plot structure cannot hold up such an ambitious theme.
In the beginning, Dave was kidnapped and sexually abused when he was a child, and ran away after four days in prison. This created a psychological shadow for Dave and had an impact on his future life (but this is not well shown in the plots afterwards). Then, on the night that his friend's daughter was killed, Dave beat up a pedophile. Before that, they had been drinking in the same bar. In this way, in a series of coincidences, the director and screenwriter deliberately made up a story about fatalism.
What is the real fatalistic story? No matter what the choices of the characters will not change the direction of their destiny. But Dave had such a choice, but unfortunately, he went to the trap that the screenwriter had dug for him early under the help of the scriptwriter. We cannot imagine that a person who has the courage to beat up a pedophile has the courage to confess this to his wife. Moreover, don't people with psychological trauma feel inferior and scared first when facing similar incidents? Obviously, Dave's characterization has a big problem. What we see is not the real Dave, but the Dave imagined by the screenwriter and the characters in the film. Therefore, in the movie, we didn't see Dave's own thoughts and thoughts, he was always only facing the interrogation of the police and his wife. At the end, Dave mistakenly believed his friend and lied again, claiming that he had killed his friend's daughter-which seemed to be another coincidence. In coincidences and coincidences, the puppet Dave walked towards the death that the screenwriter had scheduled for him.
Perhaps there is a real fatalism in the movie: Poor Dave can't escape the screenwriter's clutches no matter what, he must die.
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