Neighborhood values

I went to see _Mystic River_ last weekend – strongly recommended. Sean Penn is outstanding, Tim Robbins very nearly as good, and there isn’t a single bad, or even middling performance. It’s the best movie that I’ve seen in the last two years. However, I still reckon that you should read Dennis Lehane’s original book too. The movie concentrates almost exclusively on the individuals and the moral choices that they make. It thus misses out on one of the richer aspects of the novel – the relationship between honour, community and assimilation among immigrant groups.

There’s a telling difference between the movie and the book. In the movie, Sean the future cop, and Jimmy the future criminal, are next-door neighbors when they’re growing up. In the book, they’re from different parts of town. Sean lives in the Point, a respectable working class neighborhood, and Jimmy lives in the Flats, just twelve blocks away, but a crumbling community. This difference defines them – Sean assimilates into the wider community, and marries away from his roots, while Jimmy, after a short-lived marriage to a Puerto Rican (which diminishes his standing among his friends), marries into a family of local crooks. Sean moves on, or tries to; Jimmy never leaves the neighborhood where he was born.

Both the book and the movie are about random and inexplicable violence, and how people try to deal with it. For Jimmy, the solution lies in the neighborhood, and in its code of honour. At the beginning of the book, he’s gone straight – he isn’t involved in the local community, which is falling apart around him. The local criminals aren’t smart or organized enough to get their act together; yuppies are moving into the neighborhood and changing it, perhaps irrevocably. When Jimmy’s daughter is murdered, he’s shattered; but he recreates himself through an honour slaying which reasserts a certain kind of order, even if the killing is fundamentally mistaken in its object. And this honour code is the corner-stone of community. Jimmy should have been king of the neighborhood; it’s gone to ruin while he concentrated instead on running his local grocery store. At the end of the book, he’s about to take up his crown again, displacing the local thugs who’ve been screwing things up.

bq. That’s not how you did it. You kept your business out of your neighborhood; you didn’t make the neighborhood your business. You kept your people clean and safe and they, in gratitude, watched your back and became your ears to whispers of trouble. And if occasionally their gratitude came in the form of an envelope here, a cake or a car there, then that was their choice and your reward for keeping them safe.

Sean, in contrast, takes the random violence that he deals with in his day-to-day life as a cop, and displaces it onto his wife, ruining their relationship. She’s unfaithful, and has a baby which may or may not be Sean’s – she leaves him. Sean’s reaction to the murder of Jimmy’s daughter, and Jimmy’s subsequent, misplaced act of vengeance, is to apologize to his wife, to make it clear that no matter whether he is the biological father of his daughter or not, he is prepared to accept her; that he wants his wife and daughter to come back. He does precisely the opposite to what Jimmy does – rather than standing on his honour, and seeking to avenge a wrong that’s been done to him, he apologizes, he forgives. Sean and Jimmy become implacable enemies (or, more precisely, realize that they’ve been enemies all along without knowing it). They’ve embraced different – and radically incompatible – ways of coming to terms with America.

The power of the novel is that it doesn’t judge between the two, or if it does judge, it does so very subtly. Jimmy’s crime is horrendous – but it revitalizes a community which has become a waste land. The Fisher King heals himself, and his people too. Sean’s act of forgiveness redeems his relationship with his wife and daughter – but it’s purely personal in its effects. It doesn’t help the community where he grew up, and which he has effectively foresworn in favour of a wider America. It’s a retreat from randomness and disorder, rather than a solution to it.

These are choices that face all members of tightly-knit immigrant communities – whether to stick with your own, or cut off these thick relationships in favor of the weaker ties that hold together the wider society that you live in. _Mystic River_ has an extraordinarily subtle discussion of this dilemma, but doesn’t come down on the one side or the other. I remember going to a conference on Anglo-Irish literature ten years ago, where one of the panelists complained that nobody had written the Great Irish-American Novel. _Mystic River_ ain’t Augie March, but it’s surely a contender.