Myths of Clint Eastwood's working class.

Mystic River Directed by Clint Eastwood Successful actors generally come from unglamorous backgrounds. Later, when they become famous and are lounging in their lofts, tanning around their swimming pools or sipping glasses of expensive wine, they like to sentimentalize about "humble" origins. Very likely they dream of making "common people" movies like Clint Eastwood's Mystic River that are false to the American prole experience even while presuming to dignify it.

An unworthy opener of this year's New York Film Festival, Mystic River is hardly more than an inflated episode of CSI-it's longer but less illuminating. This conventional crime drama follows the effects of a murder on an insular Boston Irish community. The victim is the daughter of a local thug, Jimmy (Sean Penn), whose criminality is hidden behind the corner grocery store he runs. Jimmy heads a small, neighborhood gang of thieves and toughs represented by the two, unsubtly named Savage brothers. The film's insipid message, that this vicious, uneducated enclave feeds upon itself, is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane. How ironic that Lehane's sociological banalities have been turned into a prestige movie, peddling the old fall-from-grace shtick. (This proves that some readers fall for fatuous literature simply because it's not a movie.)

Eastwood directs to prove that he's being grave and serious. There isn't a happy moment-or person-in the film. Eastwood has set the dubious moralizing of American Beauty among shanty Irish, presumably representing the basic ugliness of American life. (The photography is so drained of natural color it exposes the film's pretensions.) This is America as misperceived by a comfortable, affluent but essentially middle-class actor-director who has forgotten average American life. The opening sequence gives him away: Featuring narrow streets and wood-frame tenements, it is also set in the past-because Hollywood mostly denies that poverty is a contemporary reality. So we're cunningly distanced from the life we're about to condescend to. And the condescension never stops. An 11-year-old Jimmy is shown playing baseball with his friends Sean and Dave when two shadowy men (one wearing a ring with a cross on it) abduct and molest Dave, who carries the trauma into adulthood.

Mystic River isn't gross like Sleepers (the 1996 all-star child-molestation drama) but it is similarly anti-Catholic. There's no suggestion of moral teaching. Catholicism is merely-scandalously-evoked by one rapist's ring and his priestly demeanor. This amounts to ethnic calumny, especially because Eastwood pretends to be examining characters wracked by guilt: As adults, Dave (Tim Robbins) becomes a damaged, feckless husband and father, Sean (Kevin Bacon) conveniently becomes a homicide detective and Jimmy is a hollowly grieving ex-con, thief, murderer and father. Incredulously, Jimmy laments to his now-dead daughter, "I know in my soul I contributed to your death, but I don't know how."

Examining guilt isn't even on Eastwood's agenda. Mystic River dredges the muck of tribal infighting-what successful people in Hollywood escape from then sentimentalize, as if to remind the world of an important, overlooked reality. This overly contrived crime-thriller lacks the credible sense of family relations and generational despair that made De Niro's City by the Sea so affecting. And as an art film, it is trash compared to Bruno Dumont's Humanite, which observed unpretty human nature so boldly and steadily that it penetrated the physical world and achieved a spiritual vision.

Because Eastwood stays on the surface of things, the plot of Mystic River is reduced to genre mechanisms. Eastwood apparently thinks genre is more important than truth (many critics extol his work simply for its familiarity), but his idea of "truth" is pure hokum. The script is by Brian Helgeland (who also wrote the tawdry L.A. Confidential and Payback). Eastwood and Helgeland go for an Of Mice and Men mawkishness by setting up Dave as the likely murderer-a tv-movie ploy that mulcts our sympathy for a young man's ruined life. But there's no integrity to a storyline that deliberately withholds events for the trite purposes of suspense and "mystery." Had the film fully showed Dave's activities on the night of the murder, Eastwood might have proven his genuine interest in the mundane flow of average life, achieving a marvel similar to Dumont's (or Bresson's). Instead, he offers the same specious view of man's inherent violence as in his Oscar-winner Unforgiven. That film was banal but impressively stoic, spare and therefore effective. Mystic River is grimly maudlin. At the funeral for Jimmy's daughter, Eastwood tilts his camera heavenward to match the soaring muzak. Looking for heaven (which the characters don't believe in anyway), he looks like a hack.

The acclaim for Mystic River indicates a delusion of the mainstream media that it really cares about the common person. (Neil Young lays waste to this privileged notion in his difficult, remarkable new album Greendale-a politicized fictionalization of American community that exposes Mystic River's dishonest sociology.) It's almost-though not quite-funny to see all these famous people looking hard and flattening their vowels. (This may be the pastiest-looking Caucasian cast in Hollywood history.) The ethnic put-on is part of a spurious realism. There is errant dialogue against yuppie gentrification; every character lives in an underlit home. Robbins reveals Dave's dementia in a living room so dark he could be developing photographs. No doubt this is Eastwood's visual metaphor for the benighted lower class. I'm relieved that he goes lightly on Boston racism. It allows Laurence Fishburne's laid-back performance as Sean's black cop partner Whitey Powers (ha ha) to be the film's best (he stops sullen Jimmy with a look that says "I got your number"). But at the same time, Eastwood's ease with the racism and violence of these ethnic types is itself a problem.

It's time filmmakers stop tolerating racist characters as if relaying a greater, ugly truth-it's a greater lie, a greater ignorance. To suggest that racism and violence are natural to the working class is part of the subtle condescension of Hollywood fortunates who pretend to look back. Actors like playing these gross types; it's a sanctimonious form of hamminess. Eastwood can't do it himself, but as director he indulges his cast, especially Sean Penn. Jimmy is what we now think of as a Harvey Keitel role; Penn nails a younger version. Penn has frequently used his unrefined features to evoke the brutality of common men, and when he lets out an anguished squeal (here and in Hurlyburly) the hint of spoiled adolescence can be uniquely poignant. But Eastwood too often keeps you aware of these acting moments by slowly zooming in to Penn whenever he's about to burst a blood vessel, or giving him picturesque close-ups. Detached from the regular dramatic space, Penn's performance is actually less amazing than it was in I Am Sam (which was a less sentimental movie).

Mystic River's sentimentality gets most deplorable when it becomes grandiose about the working- and criminal class. "That's what I've done. I can't undo it," Jimmy intones after he whacks an innocent man. And his wife Annabeth (Laura Linney) also gets a crazy speech, "Everyone is weak, everyone but us. We could rule this town... Nothing you do can ever be wrong." But this female fealty is wrong. She's Lady Macbeth with no consequence. Eastwood and Helgeland's suggestion that this is low-life truth dangerously imputes nobility to unhealthy machismo-another middle-class myth about the lower classes.

Describing The Deer Hunter 26 years ago, Pauline Kael wrote, "It has no more moral intelligence than the Clint Eastwood or action pictures yet it [has] an enraptured view of common life." Eastwood has now mounted his own view of common life. Like Seabiscuit, it promotes popular belief in a moment when innocence is lost, based on Dave, Sean and Jimmy's luckless youth. But beneath that fanciful notion, Mystic River's actual view of the common folk is contemptuous.