What a great film from a great book! Higgins was the master of writing pages of dialogue, stuff that could be boring if the speech wasn't true. Yates preserves much of the oral tone of the book, but he lets it breathe with wonderful exterior and interior shots. And when the characters talk, they speak to each other and not to the screen. They mumble, chop ends off words so that entire phrases are thrown into the sounds of the crowd at the hockey game, or into traffic. It's like listening to a distant radio station on a car radio late at night.
I can see the Sean Penn of today playing Mitchum's part but few others. In fact this is the film that Mystic River should have been, the parallels are there but the latter lets sentiment and friendship creep into the picture. Eddie Coyle takes us all the way and when done, it just ends....no reconcilement, just a walk off across the square after a story about pigeons.
I can see the Sean Penn of today playing Mitchum's part but few others. In fact this is the film that Mystic River should have been, the parallels are there but the latter lets sentiment and friendship creep into the picture. Eddie Coyle takes us all the way and when done, it just ends....no reconcilement, just a walk off across the square after a story about pigeons.