January
19, 2001 | According to the late, great Howard Hawks, a good movie
can be defined by these essentials: "Three great scenes. No bad
scenes." To that, I would add that a good moviemaker is someone
who can take a scene you've seen dozens of times before, and present
it in a way that makes it feel newly minted and freshly compelling.
Sean
Penn works that rare magic time and again during The Pledge,
his third and best effort as a feature film director. Much as he did
in The Indian Runner (1991) and The Crossing Guard (1995),
he sustains a mesmerizing intensity while relentlessly building toward
an emotionally wrenching climax. Better still, he does more by having
his cast do a bit less.
Like
many other great actors who have flexed their creative muscles on the
other side of the camera, Penn likes to give his players all the time
and space they need to convey the complexities of their characters.
As a result, the first two movies he directed were filled with show-stopping
performances that, all too often, really did stop the show.
In
The Pledge, however, Penn is working within the format of a police
procedural, forcing himself to pay greater attention to such niceties
as plot and pacing. Not that the acting suffers: Jack Nicholson, who
gave one of his best performances of recent years in Crossing Guard,
is even better here. And he's backed by an exceptionally strong ensemble
that includes Helen Mirren, Vanessa Redgrave and Mickey Rourke. Each
of these notables appears in a one-scene cameo, so they must make every
moment count. (Sam Shepard and Aaron Eckhart, among others, drop by
for slightly bigger roles.) Even so, none of the supporting players
is allowed to be so show-offy as to impede or undercut the narrative.
For
better or worse, Penn wrote his first two movies. In The Pledge,
however, he works from a screenplay by the husband-and-wife team of
Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski, who adapted and Americanized
a novel by Swiss author Friedrich Durrenmatt. Nicholson gives a powerfully
implosive performance as Jerry Black, a Nevada homicide detective who's
approaching the end of his career. In fact, Jerry is at his retirement
party when he hears about the discovery of a brutally murdered little
girl in the snow-covered countryside. Partly out of a sense of duty
- and, yes, partly as an excuse to leave the party early - Jerry drives
to the crime scene, where he reluctantly assumes a responsibility that
no one else wants: He agrees to break the bad news to the little girl's
parents.
Early
on, Penn subtly establishes a sense of mounting dread. The crime scene
investigation is at once conventionally familiar and unsettlingly odd:
It's just after dark, a light snow is falling, and the detectives and
uniformed officers go about their grim business with flashlights and
headlights as their only illumination. When Jerry visits the parents,
he approaches them as they tend to what look like thousands of turkey
chicks in a vast barn. We see them from a distance, and we don't hear
what Jerry tells them. But we see what his words do to them, and that's
enough.
Inside
the farmhouse, the father demands to know why Jerry doesn't want the
parents to view their daughter's body. "Because we hardly dared
to look ourselves," the detective replies. The mother insists that
Jerry swear to God that he will find the "devil" who murdered
Ginny, her daughter. Jerry swears, and his fate is sealed.
Jerry's
colleagues are ready to close the case when they arrest a likely suspect
(Benicio Del Toro, the hardest working man in showbiz today) who conveniently
confesses, then even more conveniently commits suicide. Still, Jerry
has his doubts. And those doubts calcify into certainties when he discovers
that, in a nearby town, a little girl who looked a lot like Ginny was
murdered years ago in a similar fashion. Worse, another Ginny lookalike
in another nearby town vanished without a trace. Jerry thinks he has
uncovered evidence of a serial killer. His colleagues think it's time
for Jerry to start enjoying his retirement.
Slowly,
methodically, The Pledge charts the progression of Jerry's obsession.
Seemingly on impulse, he purchases a gas station near a fishing camp.
It's in the general area where the serial killer may be lurking. And
while it's a long shot that Jerry will ever cross his path, never mind:
The ex-cop is willing to bide his time and remain ready to pounce. In
the meantime, Jerry tentatively opens his heart, and his home, to Lori
(Robin Wright Penn), a battered wife and single mother. She's a desperately
needy woman, and she finds comfort in Jerry's company. Trouble is, her
daughter is... well, a lovely little girl who might attract the killer
Jerry has been looking for. Provided, of course, that the killer isn't
a figment of his guilt-racked, paranoia-fueled imagination.
Penn
turns the conventions of police procedurals inside out, focusing intently
on the intimate details of lives indirectly but indelibly affected by
unspeakable acts. In the end, The Pledge plays fair: The truth
is revealed, the mystery is solved. And yet the tragedy is inescapable.