The Pledge
dir. Sean Penn
Warner Bros.

There are two ways to look at The Pledge. Option number one says you look at it as a Jack Nicholson vehicle, a film that is driven solely by his skill as an actor. Option number two says you take it as a product of the mind and directorial talents of Sean Penn (who also directed Nicholson in 1995’s The Crossing Guard).

Both views are equally valid, but both views, unfortunately, point in opposite directions. Nicholson has rarely been better, and he gives his character a needed, subtle pause. But Penn, on the other hand, for all his pathos and skill at evoking heart-chilling moments, is unable to keep The Pledge upright — it is as if, given a psychologically hefty script, he decided to load it down with as much weight as possible.

The film revolves around Detective Jerry Black (Nicholson), a small-town cop in rural Nevada getting set to retire. Behind him lies a long and illustrative career; ahead lies fishing in Baja. But on the last day of his job, a young girl is found raped and murdered, and Black skips out on his retirement party to check out the crime scene.

In the aftermath of the discovery, Black visits the girl’s parents and promises to find her killer, the pledge that becomes the drive behind the rest of the film. Black, officially out of a job, begins to hunt for clues on his own, finds a history of similar murders in the area and ends up buying a gas station in a town he believes holds the killer’s next victim. He befriends Lori (Robin Wright Penn), a single mother, and she and her daughter Chrissy (Pauline Roberts) move in with Black. All the while he is cunningly, quietly using Chrissy as bait, but he is also protecting her, knowing that only he stands between her and a grisly death.

The Pledge is adapted from a Friedrich Dürenmatt story of the same name, and John Irving fans will notice its striking similarity to “The World According to Bensenhaver,” a fictional novel that plays a central role in Irving’s “The World According to Garp.” Like “Bensenhaver,” The Pledge is a stark tale punctuated by exacting scenes of gore and other refuse of violent acts. Both tales follow a former agent of the law driven mad by the onus of a duty taken to an extreme. Both watch a tired, lonely man burrow his way into an intimate domestic setting. And both end in a moment of despairing, poetic justice.

In its ending, however, The Pledge bears a stronger likeness to William Friedkin’s anti-thriller The French Connection. Like Friedkin’s film, The Pledge ends on a subtly disturbing note; a surprise, not in the spectacular fashion of Seven or The Sixth Sense, but in the walking-out-of-the-theater, mumbling-“it can’t just end like that” fashion. The sort of ending that is both complete and incomplete; a muted finale to a gripping film that in its subtle turn brings the whole genre into question (the genre being, in this case, "the last hurrah for an aging cop" tale, replicated so often by over-the-hill types like Clint Eastwood and Paul Newman).

Black pursues the killer not as an agent of the law, but as a spent old man who believes that his release from the shackles of the justice system make him somehow more powerful, more sure of his goals, more representative of the truth. In the end, he self-destructs not because he fails to achieve his goals, but because he realizes that no matter what his sacrifice, the world will continue to be an irrational, wicked place. The Pledge, unlike its more conventional brothers-in-genre, is not about the triumph of good over evil; it is about the triumph of alienation and self-destruction over good will.

The Pledge is a delicate, tightly described story, and it calls for both patience and a good pace to have it told right. Unfortunately, this is where Penn slips. There are a lot of details here, a lot of things that end up clouding what should be a bare-bones narrative. We need to feel the sort of loneliness combined with a narrow, uncompromising vision that drives Black; as it is, we are distracted by too much of Black’s relationship with Chrissy, by a too-long-by-half scene involving an art therapist. And unfortunately, this ends up diluting the story’s central requirement, a careful plotting of Black’s decent into insanity. The Pledge is at times a disturbing, difficult and depressing film, but the response it will overwhelmingly evoke in its audience is frustration.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)