Review: The Pledge (2001)

People in the Movie:  Jack Nicholson, Robin Wright, Aaron Eckhart

Director:  Sean Penn

Pigeonhole:  Drama / Mystery

The Basics: On the night of his retirement, police detective Jerry Black (Nicholson) travels to a crime scene in an adjacent community with a fellow detective, Stan Krolak (Eckhart).  A young girl was murdered and the local police seem helpless.  Notifying the family falls into Jerry’s lap, and he makes a solemn promise the victim’s mother to find the murderer.  Krolak quickly closes the case pinning the murder on a mentally challenged man named Toby Jay Wadenah (Benicio Del Toro) who was seen in the area at the time.  Jerry does not agree Wadenah was the murderer and proceeds to investigate the case on his own, with very costly results.

Recommendation:   I highly recommend this film; it is a great story, it’s well directed, well acted, and is somewhat of a “hidden gem” considering it did not receive a lot of fanfare for a typical Nicholson film.  ‘R’ rating is for language and violence.

 

My Take:  While this film initially has the feel of a typical serial killer/ police procedural, it moves beyond that into something much more, and Penn does an excellent job of not allowing the closure one might normally expect from a movie in this genre.

**spoiler alert** Jerry gathers more information about the murder victim finding that the child supposedly had a friend she called the “Giant”, although no else one seemed to know who this was or had seen him, so it was treated as if the Giant was imaginary.  Jerry then learns that there was another similar murder of a young girl in a nearby community, and comes across information regarding the Giant, and that the Giant drives a dark colored wagon.  Jerry also realizes that Wadenah could not have killed this other girl.  Now convinced a serial killer is still at large, Jerry asks Krolak to re-open the case (since Jerry is now retired), which Krolak refuses to do.

Jerry does a search on the map and decides to move into the vicinity, a semi-rural area, and buys a roadside gas station with a house attached to it.  While it is not explicitly stated, it appears he has done this so he can stakeout dark colored vehicles and possible suspects for these murder cases.  He befriends a woman named Lori (Penn) who is a bartender in an establishment near his gas station.  Lori has a daughter named Chrissy who is the approximate age of the other murder victims.  Lori soon moves in with Jerry because her husband was continually beating her, and Jerry over a short time becomes a father-figure to Chrissy.  Months pass and all seems well, then Jerry meets a local reverend named Gary Jackson (Tom Noonan) who is very tall, and drives a dark colored station wagon – both of these facts, of course, pique Jerry’s interest in him as a possible suspect. 

Chrissy reveals in confidence to Jerry one night that a man gave her candy and wants to meet with her in secret.  Jerry, convinced this person is the murderer, wants to use the “meeting” to finally apprehend the killer.  Jerry pleads with Krolak to set up a SWAT team operation to catch the suspect, to which he reluctantly agrees.  Chrissy heads off to an isolated picnic spot and everyone sits in wait.  The killer never arrives.  Krolak leaves and informs Lori about this police operation which causes her to explode in anger at Jerry for putting Chrissy in possible danger.  Lori speeds off with Chrissy, not to be seen again.  As Krolak and the team are driving back to their station from the picnic stakeout, they pass a fiery car crash, which we see the tall male driver’s body burning.  It is implied, but not stated, this was the killer on his way to the picnic spot.

The last shot of the movie is Jerry standing in front of the gas station, now defunct.  Jerry is disheveled and drunk and talking out loud to himself.    

Penn did an outstanding job, start to finish, of giving the audience a flawed detective character in Nicholson, while taking a basic murder mystery story and keeping it tense at the right moments mixed in with a realistic feel.  We are given hints that Jerry was already engaging in borderline obsessive behaviors and that either his job or his personality lead him to be divorced twice, in the past.  The cherry on top for me was that even though Jerry was “right” throughout the story, that there was a serial killer out there who was on his way to probably murder Chrissy the day of the failed SWAT stakeout, he is seemingly left standing in a purgatory he created, forever questioning himself and his true motives.  And that is a question that Penn left open to interpretation – did Jerry ever really care about Lori and Chrissy, or was he more concerned about stopping a killer that he had made a promise to catch?

Final Thought/Extras/For Fun:  While I would not call this film an ensemble cast, there were multiple well-established actors with small parts in The Pledge including: Benicio Del Toro, Patricia Clarkson, Tom Noonan, Helen Mirren, Sam Shepherd, Vanessa Redgrave, Harry Dean Stanton, Mickey Rourke, and Michael O’Keefe.