Patron Pick – The Pledge

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

The Pledge (2001)
Written by Jerzy Kromolowski & Mary Olson-Kromolowski
Directed by Sean Penn

I remember liking this movie more when I saw it in college. It’s not a bad film, but The Pledge is incredibly messy. There’s a clear sense of director Sean Penn getting a day with an actor he likes and shoehorning a scene in with them. The film drips with the essence of being a picture directed by an actor. It’s more interested in being a character study that plays in the tropes of the crime thriller; that’s one of its strongest aspects. However, the script demands a plot, so throughout the entire runtime, we experience tension between Penn’s desire to play with his performers and the genre tropes indicating specific plot beats to the audience. It doesn’t surprise me that The Pledge is a movie that split critics & audiences on its release. And despite all its many flaws, it is one of Jack Nicholson’s great late-career performances.

Jerry Black (Nicholson) is attending his retirement party, ending his tenure as a homicide detective in Reno, Nevada, when the call comes in that a child’s body has been found in a nearby rural community. Jerry could stay at the party while his colleagues go on, but he can’t and follows them. An encounter with the victim’s mother (Patricia Clarkson) leads Jerry to pledge his salvation to her: He will not rest until he finds the child’s killer and brings them to justice. This is where the interesting itch of the movie takes over: how can Jerry ever know for sure when he’s got the person who did it?

It seems clear that the department has its culprit after arresting a Native man (Benicio Del Toro). That goes sour when local law fucks up transferring the prisoner to his cell, but Jerry’s captain (Aaron Eckhart) feels satisfied that the case is closed. Yet, it haunts Jerry as he embarks on his retirement, unable to leave and finding himself returning to the scene and questioning witnesses. This leads to a drawing by the victim posted in her school: she is standing next to a tall man with a black car handing her a porcupine. As Jerry finally settles down, buying a bait & tackle store in a lakeside community, he begins to suspect the killer is somehow close. Soon, any chance at happiness crumbles away as his mind becomes obsessed.

The story here isn’t anything novel. It’s the performance by Nicholson that pulled me in so strongly. We are so used to the actor as a larger-than-life, bombastic figure that we forget his many muted roles. The clip from Five Easy Pieces we always get is Nicholson exploding in the diner, but he’s playing things low-key for most of that film. Check out the King of Marvin Gardens to see the actor in a role that goes against typecasting more than anything he’s ever done, and it completely works. I loved seeing Nicholson as a thoughtful, observant person, someone going through the investigative process balanced with how tormented he is by the promise he made. No matter how exact the evidence is, there’s always room for doubt, and it’s that doubt that worms away into his mind.

Viewers coming to the film expecting a taught procedural will quickly be disappointed. Instead, we’re left with a bleak character study about someone unable to move on with their life. Our understanding of why Jerry would be like this is made clear as he visits the people left behind from child murders he believes are connected to the initial case. Mickey Rourke has a cameo as a grieving father who lives in a mental health hospital; the camera makes his face front and center as his mind is taken back to the loss when Jerry questions him. Rourke can bring the man’s pain to the surface for a brief moment before the character stuffs it back down, allowing the delusion that his daughter is on her way home from school to take his mind. This reflects the type of madness Jerry will eventually descend into, unmoored from material reality.

The other elements of the film do not support the performances. The editing, the irritating choice to do digital slow motion in post-production, is one of the banes of early 2000s films. The pacing is also interminable, with the movie seemingly starting and stopping. Penn also can’t settle on a tone for the picture, with it starting out with the feel of a straightforward crime investigation movie. We never get a smooth transition into Jerry’s retirement days, and the moment he submits to his former captain’s wishes, it feels like The Pledge starts all over again, a new movie about a retired cop living in a small town.

In the latter half of the film, Jerry’s delusion becomes briefly visible to the audience, and it’s a very jarring sequence. Yet, just a few moments later, the film delves into a new plot so ludicrously coincidental that I couldn’t stay on board. The film both wants this to be Jerry’s breaking mind and to tease the audience that somehow he has ended up in the killer’s path. You could pull this off, letting the audience get caught up in Jerry’s drive to make good on his promise, but these two halves never mesh, so the ending falls flat. It’s okay if Jerry never knows for sure, but the audience is given bits & pieces of information that leave us with an uncertainty that just doesn’t work.

I think Penn gets across the existential horror of this story, but it would have helped for it to have been bolstered with a tighter eye on the script. I can completely understand the critics who found the film plodding & aimless. Yet, I can’t help but enjoy that central performance by Nicholson. He is one of our most fascinating actors to watch at work, and this role feeds many of his strengths as a performer. This is based on a novella, and I imagine the concept works much better on the page than on the screen.