After a 7-year old girl has been found dead in the snow, police detective Jerry Black interrupts his own retirement party and goes with the team to the scene of the crime. A mentally disabled Indian man with a previous history of rape is quickly arrested and tricked into confession, but he committs suicide. The case is closed, but Jerry thinks the real killer is still at large, so he buys a local gas station and waits. He accepts a local waitress, Lori, who fled from her abusive husband, yet uses her daughter Chrissy as a bait. Jerry assumes a local priest is the child killer. Jerry and his team form a surveillance unit to track Chrissy who is in the forest, preparing a picnic, yet nobody shows up. The priest died in a car crash. Jerry is left alone at the decrepit station, drowning in alcohol.
In Sean Penn’s best outing as a director, Jack Nicholson plays one of his last and most unusual, introverted roles, as he becomes almost unrecognizable with that moustache and overweight appearance while playing the retired police inspector Jerry. “The Pledge” starts out as a typical crime investigation story, yet in its second half transitions into something more esoteric and subconscious, a psychological character study of Jerry. The said first half has great little details: upon hearing from a police detective that a murder has occurred, Jerry breaks up his retirement party and decides to go with the police team, exclaiming that his retirement “doesn’t start till six more hours”. He finds an alleged clue, a pen on the scene of the crime, but one police officer just picks it up: “Sorry, that’s mine”. In one sequence, after the suspect shot himself in the head, Jerry takes a look at the bloody wall, takes a knife and extracts a metal piece from it, which falls on the floor. His colleague asks him this: “Is it a bullet?” - “No, a tooth.” However, the movie shifts away from this realism and takes on a more philosophical, even surreal note later on. Jerry insists the real child killer is still out there, even after the case is closed, while Penn slyly inserts hallucinatory voices inside Jerry’s head every once in a while, to create a sense of uncertainty: it is never clear if Jerry is indeed right about the case, or if he is just slowly losing his mind from dementia, making his judgements unrealiable. Just like Hitchcock, Penn sets up several false alarms, and the viewers are not even sure if the other main suspect is truly guilty or not. Similarly like Fincher’s “Zodiac”, “The Pledge” also has an unorthodox open ending, steering away from the crime genre towards a conemplation about the limits of human knowledge and epistemology, as well as the inescapable fatalism. Due to such an abstract theme, and occasionally rather bland, standardly written dialogues or a strange scene, the movie did not initially attract a mass audience, but Penn never intended to make a mainstream blockbuster, but rather a bitter, honest and unassuming little film that has a certain staying power.
Grade:+++
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