"The Pledge"

Nothing that follows happens in the way we're led to expect, but Penn isn't enough of a craftsman -- or an entertainer -- to make use of the misdirection. So, like Dürrenmatt's, his version of the material winds up failing as both thriller and character study. Some of what he comes up with is striking, like the opening shots of a round-the-bend Nicholson, over which Penn superimposes a shot of black crows; for a minute, it looks as if Jerry has been visited by the torments you see in Vincent van Gogh's final canvases. There's also an effective moment when a young, overweight boy discovers the body of the murdered girl and registers the shock by his wheezing inability to catch his breath. And there's a lovely view of Penn after she first kisses Nicholson where her smile registers in a shot that allows us to see only her eyes.

But too much is calculated -- Jerry's fragile mental state signaled by an ominous, amplified close-up of a ticking clock, the repeated quick cutting to stray objects that loom up with portentous meaning -- or calculatedly odd. A police receptionist painting her toenails is shot so we see her fat haunches. And is there a reason why several of the townspeople appear to be (or are played as if they were) retarded? Penn's periodic attempts to jack up the thriller tension are hokey. He may be trying to avoid the impersonal violence of thrillers, but he miscalculates badly in showing crime scene and autopsy photos of murdered children.

Penn has assembled an amazing cast -- Sam Shepard, Harry Dean Stanton, Vanessa Redgrave and Helen Mirren all turn up. Most have only a scene, and some, like Mirren and Redgrave, use their authority to make an impression. But you want more from them than service roles. And as much as he loves actors, Penn doesn't know when to say no to them. Del Toro, so good in "Traffic," gives a gimmicky performance as the mentally handicapped Indian accused of murdering the little girl. Alternately mumbling, employing a strangled Marvin the Martian voice or panting like a dog, Del Toro makes the kind of bad choice that an alert director would have overruled in rehearsal. It's an actor showing off, and throwing you right out of what should be a key scene.

The best of all the cameos is from Mickey Rourke, as the father of a girl who has disappeared. He looks like hell, puffy and gray, but in his few minutes of screen time he banishes from your mind all the tabloid stories of his hard living. Rourke gets to the naked essence of a man unhinged by sorrow. In a way, the brevity of his role is a favor; I don't know how he could sustain the depth of grief in this scene over a longer performance.

Nicholson gives in to neither the clowning showiness nor the heavy-spirited recessiveness he is prone to. Were the film shaped better, it might be one of his very best performances. He suggests some of what he had in "The Border" (his least-known terrific performance), the determination of a man hounded by the desire to do good. And he's beautifully relaxed in his scenes with the young Roberts. His paunch and the lines on his face take on the poignancy of a man who has found contentment later than he ever expected. (Nicholson may be one of the rare actors who can play a loving parent without sentimentalizing the part.) He doesn't overdo Jerry's obsessiveness; he makes us feel the danger in Jerry's determination to keep his promise. That's why it's a drag that Penn cuts in Jerry's "visions" or layers voices on the soundtrack as if Jerry were schizophrenic.

At times, "The Pledge" suggests what Bruno Dumont's plodding "Humanité" might have been with an actor in the lead. It's not a fraud, like that much-heralded stinker. I sat through "Humanité" in a state of stupefied fascination, wondering who in his right mind would make a movie that deliberately dull. "The Pledge" is just a bad movie, with more bits of good acting and flashes of director's invention than you get in most bad movies. But it too suffers from crippling ambitions toward aesthetic purity. You can't do a blood thriller when you keep yourself at such a remove from the mechanics. "The Pledge" is a divisive experience; it feels like it was made by a man who thinks that art and entertainment, by necessity, must be two separate things.

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