Review of The Pledge (2001) by Pip D — 22 Aug 2011

As ever, I love Penn as a director. Now I've seen this film I've seen every one of his directorial efforts to date.

I didn't fall in love with this one like I did The Crossing Guard and Into the Wild, but I still really liked it and found it worked better than The Indian Runner (though you have to excuse the flaws a little in a debut feature, I feel, and I do need to give The Indian Runner a second watch).

Like with The Crossing Guard, Nicholson portrays another protagonist that you can truly side with, despite his flaws (here, his somewhat flimsy mental state - noting, for example, how he often doesn't seem to hear people and then asks them to repeat themselves).

For some reason Penn opts to make Wright Penn (his wife) look rather ugly here - at for the first three quarters of the film while she's got the tooth missing; I suppose it's a product of her beatings and her being from a small town and probably poor. In other films she looks great.

I was looking out for Sam Shepard for the whole film then was baffled when I though I'd missed him at the end - then I realised he was the cop that Nicholson was pleading about reopening the case with; I haven't seen him in anything except Days of Heaven, so this being almost thirty years later, the way he's aged forced me not to even recognise him.

They always get Tom Noonan to play the creepy serial killer (case in point: Manhunter) - because he's creepily tall, and can pull of so charming and friendly, but with a hint of something scary underneath.

They never explained why Del Toro's character confessed and we're left to just assume it was due to his mental disorder, and perhaps was just recipropcating being nice to Eckhart, because Eckhart was being nice to him. But that still doesn't explian why he also then said "I killed her" again and then shot himself.

I presume Noonan is the guy who got killed in the car accident at the end, meaning that Jerry was right about him going after the girl at that exact time, but neither the cops, nor even him (until he read found out about the car accident) knows that he was right.

A real cop would meander around agreeing to pledge a promise to Clarkson to find her daughter's killer. And I kept thinking what if he's not even a religious man also. But there should be more cops like this, who let no case of a murdered child lie, who pursue it to the greatest lengths. Although he did basically use the girl as bait (even down to pursuading her to choose the red dress because he knew this to be one of the criteria for the killer picking his victims), he was doing an honourable thing overall.

It needed more to it, but still yet another very good film from Penn.