"The Pledge"

Jack Nicholson as a hallucinating ex-cop is almost as good as he's ever been, but he can't save Sean Penn's pretentious thriller.

By Charles Taylor

Jan 19, 2001 | Sean Penn's work as a director is intelligent and considered. He appears to be probing for the psychic truth of each moment, and he reveres actors, allowing them the space to explore and ruminate on their characters. When so many movies are slovenly and dumb, the type of care that Penn takes is not inconsiderable.

But he is also the furthest imaginable thing from an instinctive filmmaker. Unlike his acting, Penn's direction is given to flat, self-conscious realism. He has no feel for pacing, no cunning, no natural flow. The stray shots -- of the hoods of dirty pickup trucks, a ticking clock, a slot machine's whirring -- and the stray actors' moments accumulate without cohering into a larger vision. Penn's movies, including the new "The Pledge," the third he has directed, play like what you might see in an acting and directing workshop, the tentative, exploratory work done before a performance, before settling on a tone or an arc that will carry the audience through the story.

Some directors are geniuses at employing improvisation techniques within an established structure (no one is better than Robert Altman), but Penn doesn't have the imagination or the discipline to pull it off. You wish him well because he so clearly wants to do meaty, worthwhile work. I winced at the laughter that punctuated the preview screening I attended, but "The Pledge" is so maddeningly unsatisfying that I understood exactly why the audience threw up their hands in exasperation at the end.

It makes sense that Penn would be drawn to Friedrich Dürrenmatt's detective novella "The Pledge"; it's a sort of anti-thriller that suits his anti-movie tendencies. The story is told within a framing device that's jettisoned from the film. After delivering a lecture on his craft, a mystery writer meets a police detective who tells him a story to illustrate how, in real life, crimes aren't solved as conveniently as they are in crime fiction. It's a compact and compelling book, and its portrait of an obsessed cop has moments of real creepiness.

It's also a cheat. When writers or directors hook an audience with the conventions of a genre and then, perversely, refuse to make good on that promise, as Dürrenmatt does, they're in effect saying, "I'm above this sort of thing," and it's the readers and moviegoers who end up feeling cheated, made to pay the price for the creator's show of higher taste. Dürrenmatt's book is a brilliant piece of literary dissection, an attempt to deconstruct the conventions of the detective genre by placing them alongside the unresolved messiness of real crime. But it's also neither low enough nor high enough to be satisfying.

Penn and screenwriters Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olsen-Kromolowski have moved the story to modern-day Reno, Nev. Jack Nicholson plays Jerry Black, a police detective who, a few hours before he's set to retire, gets word that a little girl has been brutally murdered in a rural community. An eyewitness has seen an Indian man (Benicio Del Toro) fleeing from the murder scene. When it turns out that the fellow has a previous conviction for statutory rape, he appears to be the obvious suspect. It's too obvious for Jerry. Captured, the Indian readily accedes to the confession Jerry's designated successor (Aaron Eckhart) suggests to him. But to Jerry it's clear that the man, who's mentally handicapped, doesn't know what he's doing. And when he kills himself in police custody, Jerry is the only one unwilling to close the case. Dogged by the promise he made to the dead girl's mother (Patricia Clarkson), Jerry begins investigating on his own time, becoming increasingly disheveled, and without help from his former colleagues, he thinks he's cracking up.

His obsession begins to kick into high gear when he learns of two similar unsolved murders of little girls and he's able to deduce the parameters of the area the killer is prowling. He buys a gas station in the rural town and, relying on cryptic clues left behind in a drawing done by the most recent victim, spends his days watching his customers, certain that the killer will reveal himself. After befriending a young, divorced waitress, Lori (Robin Wright Penn), who's being threatened and beaten by her ex-husband, Jerry invites her and her little girl, Chrissy (bright, clear-eyed Pauline Roberts), to live with him; and the three form a sort of surrogate family.

The warmth that Penn introduces into the couple's relationship, and the love affair between them, may seem like a softening of the quid pro quo relationship that exists between the woman and the detective in Dürrenmatt's book. But it has the potential to make what follows seem even more disturbing. When Chrissy confides in Jerry that she's met the mysterious man he's seeking ("the wizard," she calls him), he uses the child as bait to catch the killer.

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