Review of The Pledge (2001) by Hadas Emma K — 11 Jul 2011

Sean Penn's somber, wintry meditation starts as a cop story and coils into subjective obsession and personal mission. It gives Jack Nicholson one of his paramount roles, as a retiring detective who makes a vow and struggles to honor it. It sees the longing for justice running wild and growing treacherous. The story has the rudiments of a crime thriller---cops, suspects, fatalities, evidence---but ultimately it's a character study, and in Detective Jerry Black, Nicholson crafts a character we can't turn away from en route to the dusk of his compulsion.

Jerry is retiring in Reno. He's from a bygone age band glancing around for ashtrays in the offices of non-smokers. News arrives that the disfigured corpse of a girl has been discovered. Dedicated Jerry wants to work out his last day, and ultimately finds himself bearing the heartbreaking information to the parents. This scene, set by Penn on the couple's turkey farm, is astonishing in its backdrop and its effect. Nicholson weaving through thousands of turkey chicks, finally holding a crucifix made by the slain Ginny, he promises "by his soul's salvation" that he'll catch the murderer. This is the eponymous pledge, and in due course it consumes him.

It seems initially that the murderer has been caught. Benicio Del Toro plays a Native American, clearly retarded, who was witnessed fleeing from the scene. Evidence appears to connect his pickup truck with the atrocity. Show-off detective Aaron Eckhardt extracts a confession, with Jerry fidgeting behind the glass and saying the Native American "doesn't understand the question." Then the Native American takes matters into his own hands, quite literally, cementing his guilt in the minds of the police. Except for Jerry. He's been doing this too long.

In retirement, he persists in probing the case, in time discovering that the departed Ginny had befriended a "giant" she called "The Wizard." Who was he? Was he the culprit? Was he connected to other unresolved slayings of little children? Now Penn, carving from Friedrich Durrenmatt's novel and the adaptation Jerzy and Mary Kromolowski, seamlessly start the film's gradual plunge into Jerry's obsession. He oddly buys a gas station convenience store flanked by two townships where he believes the Wizard might've killed similarly. Analyzing doodles by Ginny, he believes he knows what vehicle the killer might've driven: The store is an unassuming snare.

An unanticipated thing occurs. He meets mother Robin Wright Penn and her young daughter, and they share an intuitive compassion that buds into something more. After a couple of divorces, Jerry finally experiences what a content family life can be. We instantly grasp that the daughter is would-be prey, if the killer is in fact still on the loose. We believe Jerry realizes this, too. Though certainly he wouldn't draw on this lovely little girl as a lure? The core predicament of Jerry's pursuit is that he's the sole person who has confidence in it. His ex-contemporaries assume he's gone over the edge. Even chief Sam Shepard, an old comrade, looks despondently at Jerry's deranged fanaticism. His gas station ruse may be a gamble, or the work of a seasoned top-drawer cop, or just confirmation that he's losing sight of reality. The final act of the movie is where most police stories go on self-steer, with compulsory chases and mass fights. That's when The Pledge becomes most forcefully gripping. Penn and Nicholson take chances with the material and exalt the movie to another, surprising, poignantly lingering altitude.

What is unmistakable about Penn as a director is that he finds no appeal in making conventional films. He is enthralled by characters under great tension. He's jaded by run-of-the-mill genre exercises. The character of Jerry here is not just a good cop, but a retired man, palpably of a particular generation, a man overcome by a cast-iron notion. He's capable on one hand of conveying charisma and permanence, one incentive for the younger woman being that he bids tranquility after her aggressive marriage. But we intuit murkier, more grave undercurrents, and concerns he isn't entirely alert to himself. By the end, the tension pivots by and large on Jerry himself, and the resolution of the crime is a profoundly haunting axis for the unforgettable images of him that bookend the film. It's here that Nicholson's talent is most crucial, and most valued: He has to illustrate for us a guy who has embarked on a shocking and lonesome mission into the mystifying spaces of his psyche.