Clint Eastwood’s new film Mystic River is currently enjoying positive national press and a wide release (including a run down the street at the Grandview). It tells the story of three childhood friends––Dave, Jimmy and Sean––whose lives are forever changed when Dave is abducted by child molesters at age 11. As adults, they find themselves reunited when Jimmy’s 19-year-old daughter is murdered.

Dave, now an unemployed loner at an emotional disconnect from his wife, becomes the chief suspect. Sean, a police detective estranged from his wife, investigates the case while Jimmy, an ex-con gone legit, seeks vengeance on his own terms. The film is set up like a conventional suspense story or mystery, though Eastwood trumps genre conventions by fashioning a more meditative work about the problems of the main characters and, implicitly, American society.

Of all the works currently on display at the Walker Art Center (including retrospectives of Jasper Johns’ paintings and Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries), my personal favorite is a 26-minute video by the Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra, The Buzz Club, Liverpool, England/Mysteryworld, Zaandam, Netherlands (1996-1997). Dijkstra is something of a video portraitist, taking people emblematic of real-life institutions out of their element––in this case, popular clubs in England and the Netherlands––and then filming them in lab-like conditions.

The Buzz Club consists of different projections running simultaneously on two screens; the subjects are club-goers who appear to be between the ages of 15 and 25. Standing against a white screen, they do what they’d normally do in clubs: dance to house music, drink beer, make out. Dijkstra films the kids one or two at a time, isolating actions that are normally hidden behind groups.

What does The Buzz Club have to do with Mystic River? Aside from the fact that both deal with young people in vulnerable positions, they strike me as representing two extremes of movie acting. Mystic River has been praised, even by some of its detractors, for its ensemble; members of the cast will probably be nominated for Academy Awards. It is a movie in which top actors (such as Tim Robbins and Laura Linney) are called upon to bear their souls, convey anguish, weakness and humility. This is especially true of Sean Penn, who plays the grief-stricken yet still-violent Jimmy as a combination of brute and threatened child.

To be honest, I wasn’t particularly affected by Penn’s performance––or anyone else in the cast, for that matter. The achievement of the performers in Mystic River, according to the mainstream press, is the thoroughness with which they’ve embodied other people, transcended their celebrity and emerged with something universally human. Yet because of celebrity and his past history of playing other people, Sean Penn’s Jimmy, for example, ends up being as much about Sean Penn as it does the character he ostensibly portrays.

There’s something so ’50s about this kind of display, which many consider to have been epitomized by Marlon Brando and which a few blame as an indirect inspiration for the current star system. I’m reminded of what Kent Jones once wrote of Tom Cruise, as a means of explaining by converse what ennobles the approach to acting in Robert Bresson’s movies: that Cruise’s channeling of emotion always seems tinged with narcissism because it’s made to feel like a gift, something he was selflessly giving of himself to an adoring audience. While I wouldn’t accuse Sean Penn of a comparable narcissism, Jones’ critique of Tom Cruise feels practically inevitable when discussing contemporary movie stars.

Had Mystic River been a play, I more than likely would have been moved by Penn’s performance; because it was a movie, his acting seemed like too much or not enough. One enters the theater with a thorough recognition of illusion, and this illusion is most often maintained or broken by actors. The illusion of the cinema, I feel, is a different one. Every detail is not real, but more than real,, magnified both by the size of the screen and the fact that what’s being viewed is a finished document. The illusion is sustained not by actors, but the collaborative work of actors, directors, editors and many others.

For this reason, I’ve never claimed to have any favorite movie stars (or least favorites, for that matter). I’m also not of the opinion that an uninspired performance will necessarily detract from a movie. Regardless of talent, an actor’s body, movement and speech patterns still contribute greatly to the aesthetic of a movie, a cinematic truth that Bresson understood better than anybody.

Many would argue that nobody is “acting” in Dijkstra’s video, since the kids are simply doing things they’d be doing even if the camera weren’t turned on them. Yet Dijkstra films her subjects dead-on, with no distractions, so that they’re always aware of the camera. Even if they do nothing, they’re still performing for her, like it or not. And through their performances, Dijkstra captures a sense of character that is both deeply rooted in how people choose to present themselves and to elements of their physicality that are beyond their control.

In one section of The Buzz Club, a girl around 20, wearing a white outfit that exposes her potbelly and thighs, dances to bland techno. She doesn’t appear to be that “into” what she’s doing, and yet her movements and her clothes are still undeniably sexual, inviting. One doesn’t need a dirty mind to imagine her taking home a one-night stand. Yet more than a history of promiscuity, Dijkstra finds in her face an unshakeable apathy––towards sex and just about anything else. As a state-of-Western-youth argument goes, it’s among the most despairing I’ve ever seen.

Mystic River also features kids behaving badly: An early scene depicts underage drinking, and a climactic one shows an older adolescent threatening a younger one with a gun. As with many of the other scenes in the movie, I may have found these moments affecting had Eastwood’s autumnal cinematography, steady tracking shots and dopey music (standards of serious Hollywood filmmaking) weren’t there to tell me how solemn the whole thing was. And not to read too much into a director’s politics, but Eastwood’s use of American iconography––such as boys playing stickball and a main-street parade––says less about the film’s Boston setting and more about the director’s bias, which borders on reactionary.

With such heavy-handedness behind the camera, I’m not sure how talented actors could emerge with any autonomy or achieve any genuine soul-bearing. The difference between a Rineke Dijkstra video and Mystic River is comparable to the differences between the amateur pornography you find all over the Internet and the professional-grade porn coming out of southern California, in which the spectacle of watching people fuck has long since upstaged the thrill and physicality of fucking.