January 18–25, 2001

movie shorts

The Pledge

Sean Penn keeps giving up acting for this? On his third film as a director, Penn’s picked up some visual control (probably courtesy of cinematographer Chris Menges), but he’s still just as tone-deaf to an audience’s tolerance for having their faces rubbed in shit. In The Pledge, Jack Nicholson plays a Reno detective who leaves his retirement party to take up the case of an eight-year-old girl who’s been raped and murdered. Though the police (including cocky upstart Aaron Eckhart) are sure they’ve gotten their man when they pull over a mentally retarded Indian (Benicio Del Toro) who conveniently blows his brains out before he can be tried, Nicholson becomes convinced the killing is part of a pattern, and starts investigating rape/murders of small girls all around the state. Not surprisingly, this doesn’t produce a particularly healthy state of mind, and Nicholson sinks deeper into his obsession as his friends and former colleagues start to label him "a drunk and a clown." Penn, who’s become something of a cinema Calvinist (disdaining Nicolas Cage for being an "entertainer") doesn’t see fit to leaven the mood with anything so crass as humor of self-consciousness, which means we’re stuck watching Nicholson pound himself into the ground for two hours-plus, while a parade of actors (Vanessa Redgrave, Helen Mirren, Tom Noonan, Sam Shephard, even Robin Wright Penn with a digitally-chipped tooth) try on ill-fitting clothes and do their best to seem "authentic." Ironically, the movie’s disdain for clichés makes it all too vulnerable to them; the ending’s manipulative cross-cutting would’ve embarrassed D.W. Griffith.

—Sam Adams