Top 250 Challenge: 215

Mystic River (2003)
Number 177 on IMDb's Top 250

During a summer in 1975, Dave Boyle (Tim Robbins) and two friends, Jimmy (Sean Penn) and Sean (Kevin Bacon), are playing on a sidewalk in Boston when Dave is abducted by two men and subjected to sexual abuse over a period of several days. Eventually escaping, but haunted into adulthood by his trauma, Dave becomes a primary suspect when Jimmy's daughter, Katie, is found murdered. Sean, now a homicide detective is assigned to investigate the crime, and finds himself facing both demons from the past and demons in the present as the circumstances surrounding Katie's death are uncovered. Hilarity ensues.

Trivia: While researching his character's occupation, Kevin Bacon worked in the office of the Massachusetts State Police. Eli Wallach appears uncredited as a liquor store owner. This is the first time he has worked on a film with Clint Eastwood since the two of them starred in The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly (1966). In the beginning of the movie when a young Dave is thrown into the backseat of the car, a man in the front seat turns around and flashes his ring - a bishop's ring. The book never indicates that the character was a priest, but it was added to the film since the filming was right in the middle of the priest scandal in the Boston Archdiocese.

When a movie garners two best acting Oscars (Penn and Robbins) and has actors like Kevin Bacon, Lawrence Fishburne, Marsha Gay Harden, and Laura Linney in it, you know you are in for a treat. This movie didn't disappoint, and actually got better toward the end when things started to fall in place. Penn and Robbins rightfully deserved the Oscars playing, respectively, the distraught father who had just lost his 19 year old daughter, his only link to his dead first wife, and a man with a tortured soul who's life drastically changed thirty years earlier. Marsha Gay Harden was also very good as Dave's wife who begins to suspect that he may have done something terrible.

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