Derogation: The removal of something from a larger entity, thus causing harm to the whole.

Hysteresis: The influence of previous actions on subsequent events.

"I just wanna hug her one more time," cries Jimmy Markum (Sean Penn), who spends the duration of Mystic River debating where to direct his grief over the murder of his oldest daughter. Clint Eastwood's crafted a not-entirely-successful tale of three childhood pals who were once divided by misfortune, and in adulthood are reunited by tragedy on an equally traumatic scale. And if there wasn't already enough to lament in the story itself, Eastwood only adds to the calamity by not knowing when to quit.

Had River been filmed, say, in the fifties, the opening sequence would've served as a novel psychological primer on how childhood upheavals affect one's development in not so desirable ways. As it is, though, it's meant to suggest a central character could turn into the murder mystery's wildcard. Playing street hockey in the fictional and not-quite-affluent Irish Boston neighborhood of "Pen Park," three preadolescent chums pause to write their names in a square of fresh sidewalk cement only to be scolded by a pair of older gents claiming to be plainclothes police. They send home the two boys who live closest by, but order the third into the car, announcing that they'll be taking little Dave to his parents themselves.

These aren't cops, though, but pedophiles, and Dave's whisked off to some basement cell and subjected to any number of flagitous degradations before he escapes four days later. (It's a relief Eastwood only suggests these horrors with a very fifties shorthand; less original is the choice to make one of the abusers a priest.) We then cut to the present, and a grown-up Dave (Tim Robbins) dotes after his own son, and when we already know River's got more transgressions on the horizon, it seems only too obvious that the preceding events should already finger the perpetrator. In the fifties, maybe, but contemporary audiences will expect things to be a little more complicated.

Nonetheless, Dave comes home late one night with stab wounds and a good smattering of blood on him, and he explains to his wife it was due to a thief he was fighting off, but the next day Jimmy's daughter Katie, who's probably just out of high school, turns up missing, and assigned to the case is none other than their third friend Sean (Kevin Bacon), who's now a police detective. Already the geometry seems too neat: one's the bereaved, one's going to solve the case, and the third is a suspect.

Luckily Eastwood understands that the mystery itself would make for a pretty dry movie, so he texturizes the affair with both a gallery of colorful characters with their own journeys to make within the frames of River, and a provincial neighborhood probably quite unlike what most of us would expect in this ever-interconnected America of the twenty-first century. It would seem that Dave never left the quarter he grew up in, even though he daily passes by the block where he was abducted decades ago, and though Jimmy spent some time in prison for theft as a young adult, he's returned to Pen Park and enjoys a comfortable existence as a corner-grocery owner and a father of three girls (two from his current marriage, and Katie from a previous one). Sean, though having made it across the river to the Big City, has his own problems - his wife left him just recently, but telephones often, though she has nothing to say.

While Sean (and his ever-skeptical partner "Whitey," played by Lawrence Fishburne) goes about scouring for clues, Jimmy enlists his own local connections to get to the bottom of things, determined to exact justice on the killer in more immediately satisfying ways. And when Sean asks Dave what happened to his scratched-up hand, he says this time that he was "helping somebody move a couch," and it's clear to us he's got something to hide. Surely in this cinematic age it's a red herring, but even his wife Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden, convincingly dim) begins to suspect him, and Jimmy's rage isn't going to wait indefinitely for release.

It's probably Eastwood's own vast background as an actor that allows him to give River's performers plenty of room to strut their stuff, and none more than Penn, whose combination of fearsome musculature (it's not so hard to imagine Jimmy's done time) and fatherly reading glasses suggests a straight line from his familial devotion to his animalistic thirst for vengeance. But when the camera swirls overhead as Jimmy screams to the heavens upon the discovery of Katie's mangled remains you wonder if Eastwood isn't laying it on a bit thick - as thick as the gray paint in Jimmy's temples (not the most deft makeup job). For the first hour or so, though, Eastwood ably juggles the proceedings of the investigation and the human impact among Pen Park's residents, and we wait to see if the two threads will dovetail into Dave's furtive lap.

But as Bacon and Fishburne start to realize the truth may be significantly more complicated, River becomes mired in the minutiae of a standard prime-time police procedural, and Eastwood loses sight of the Oscar®-caliber performances that drew us into the theater in the first place. Harden deserves special mention for her increasingly conflicted Celeste - she's utterly encumbered by guilt over what her husband might have done, and fears the opprobrium of the community more than anything, and whereas a portrayal of simple-mindedness this effective hasn't been seen on the screen since Anthony Quinn in Requiem for a Heavyweight, it seems Eastwood has a lot of circumstantial evidence to get through before we can again enjoy the actorly talents of Harden and the others.

River's increasing lack of economy becomes fully clear to us when we realize that Sean's wife hasn't called in a while, after we'd gotten used to hearing his phone ring every twenty minutes or so, and his legwork keeps piling up all sorts of details whose relevance will remain unclear to us until the very end. It's sloppy storytelling, but amidst the longueurs comes a surprising revelation: Kevin Bacon has matured into one hell of an actor. I don't care what accolades are poured upon Penn, this is Bacon's moment to shine, and his now-fortysomething features have coalesced into a visage ripe with expressiveness. I've found him nothing but bland in previous years, but his silent discomfort as he gets closer to an answer is worlds more compelling than the theatrics that snag Penn an Oscar® nomination just about every other year.

Eastwood's just about lost us when we witness Jimmy's vigilante tactics potentially working at cross-purposes with the truth, and even when it becomes clear that River's moral is about living with the consequences of one's actions, this theme's been more than adequately communicated long before Eastwood drop the curtain. He's reaching for some sort of elegiac effect as it drones on, and it's possible he got caught up in his own Oscar®-ly aspirations. The end result is fulsome and supererogatory, and only partly as great as it could've been.

There is probably no greater sadness than your children preceding you in death, an utterly unnatural twisting of the intended order of things, and it is for that reason that filmmakers must find it such a rich source of material. As far away as Belgium the Dardenne brothers (Jean-Pierre and Luc) composed their own account of kindercidal woe last year, and The Son is finally making the rounds on this continent, a film that proves once again that at least the Europeans are familiar with the benefits of restraint.

On the flip side, however, their oft-smaller budgets (and hence smaller financial risks) allow for greater leeway in creative presentation, and Son seems to take a page from Dogme95's book with its obtrusive hand-held camerawork. In this case the camera's virtually always hovering over the shoulder of its central character, procluding any establishing shots that might give us a better sense of spatial relations. Always having the same head filling the jostling frame at all times makes for a potentially claustrophobic experience (think Blair Witch Project) but there's definitely enough intrigue to keep you in your seat.

It also feels highly intrusive when our subject is a man who's son was murdered five years prior and then discovers his child's teenage killer might be his new carpentry apprentice. Olivier's a teacher at a trades school, an effective if curt instructor, and we slowly piece together that his marriage did not survive the loss of their offspring (the Dardennes exhibit a marked allergy to straightforward expository dialogue). Through his strong prescription glasses magnify his eyes on screen, Olivier's pretty much impossible to read, and maybe just as likely to follow Jimmy's route in Mystic River when he realizes his fortuitous opportunity.

Like River's milieu, as well as the Dardennes' brilliant previous feature Rosetta (winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes), this is a very working-class world The Son explores, and whose inhabitants also need time to make sense of their impulses. Olivier secretly and endlessly stares at Francis (Morgan Marinne) napping in the locker room before finally offering him a spot in his class, and though he's a perfectly professional teacher these first days, he also follows him home to ascertain his current whereabouts. Whereas he tries to intervene on behalf of one student whose junkie mother pulls him from the school, he also lifts Francis' keys one afternoon to get a quick look at his living situation. There's something Olivier wants to know about this person who altered his life so drastically - or else it's a case of "keep your enemies closer."

Francis doesn't even know what initials are, and he's hopeless carrying planks up a ladder, but he's an earnest student, and he's appreciative that his new teacher is taking such an interest in him. The only and few times the camera isn't being inscribed with Olivier's hyper-serious face it's giving us glimpses of this child murderer, and of his less-than-cozy family life before he went to a juvenile prison for five years. Since the frame is always devoted to the elder's immediate surroundings, it's clear he's occupying himself with his new charge to no small degree - and Olivier may understand his own motivations as poorly as we do thus far.

At times The Son's presentation resembles reality TV, with the camera invading Olivier's personal space at all times, and Olivier Gourmet's unself-conscious performance was clearly worthy of his Best Actor award at Cannes in 2002; equally impressive is his ability to simultaneously evoke enormous sympathy in us over his loss, and a vivid dread he's gonna snap at any moment. The Dardennes' script sustains long stretches of ambiguity dotted with sudden dramatic jabs, and when Olivier noticeably refuses to shake Francis' hand, or pay for his apple turnover when they're hanging out together, we're reminded there's plenty to be resolved before the lights come up.

Olivier invites the kid along on a Saturday to help retrieve wood from his brother's lumber yard for the next week's class projects, and it's on this lengthy road trip he starts covertly fishing for insight from his emotional nemesis. Eventually Francis submits he did jail time just for "theft," but when pressed confesses "…and some other stuff." Olivier plugs away at him, searching for any sign of remorse, and even though we feel Olivier must be thinking "you little sh*t" with every line, Francis has no idea of his inner tumult, and even asks him to be his legal guardian. Thus surfaces the central moral dilemma: the potential betrayal lurking on the horizon, being both Mentor and Revenger, is this as reprehensible as the crime that started it all?

Forgiveness rarely comes easy, but it's one of the few qualities that make us human, and Olivier's expected crossroads sneaks up on us as did every previous seismic plot shift, and the Dardennes pull it off with worlds more finesse than the older Eastwood ever has. The silences, the accursed ubiquitous camera, the occasionally unexplained details all illustrate how sometimes we simply don't know what we want, other than to somehow stop being so sad. And the trick is to make sure the cure isn't worse than the illness.