The Big Picture: The Pledge (15)

A matter of life and death

In Sean Penn's majestically bleak film The Pledge, a crime and its detection become acids that eat their way into a man's soul. Penn's third film as director, after The Indian Runner (1991) and The Crossing Guard (1995), is by some distance his best and his most morally intricate and expertly directed. It comes crowned with a performance of nearly awe-inspiring intensity by Jack Nicholson. He plays a cop named Jerry Black who, only hours away from his retirement, goes to investigate the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl. When he reports this awful news to the family, the child's distraught mother (Patricia Clarkson) asks him to swear by his "soul's salvation" that he will apprehend the killer. Jerry makes the pledge, and from that moment is bound in the toils of a pathological obsession.

The set-up has the classic shape of an American thriller, yet in tone and treatment The Pledge feels European. This is partly because it's based on the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt's 1958 novel, which Penn and his writers, Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski, have transposed to the sombre wintry landscape of Nevada. From the long opening shot of a hut on a frozen lake, Chris Menges's photography establishes a mood of terrible solitude and estrangement, with lowering skies and mist-covered mountains furnishing an ominous backdrop to the drama. Penn takes this drama at a European pace, too, and shoots scenes in ways you don't quite expect: the old standby of a jailhouse interrogation is infused with a curious tension by the constant switch of camera angles, and the fact that the interrogating officer (Aaron Eckhart) almost caresses the murder suspect, a mentally disturbed Indian (Benicio Del Toro) into confessing.

When their suspect kills himself on the way to the holding cell, the Reno police department seems to have an open-and-shut case. But Jerry isn't satisfied, not only because the dead man's guilt was clouded with uncertainty, but because he needs the case to give his fagged-out life fresh purpose – it seems that once his career is finished his life will be, too. This sense of doggedness, of lonely resolve, keenly recalls the cop character played by Nick Nolte in Paul Schrader's Affliction (1997). The two films have other similarities, most particularly the way an apparent whodunnit slowly fans out into an ambiguous study of evil. Jerry, pursuing clues contained in a painting by the murdered child, buys a gas station in the area where two similar unsolved killings were committed some years back.

At first it's not clear what he's up to. He does some fishing out on the lake, tends the gas pumps, and slowly befriends Lori (Robin Wright Penn, with a chipped front tooth and no make-up), a waitress at the local diner. When she turns up one night, covered in bruises from her ex, with her eight-year-old daughter Chrissy (Pauline Roberts) in tow, Jerry takes them in. He seems to have found the family he never had, until we realise, with a shock, that his quasi-paternal tenderness is another stage on his personal Calvary, since he's prepared to use Chrissy as bait to catch the killer. His watchfulness becomes so obsessive that he starts to imagine danger where none exists; he's chasing shadows, and on evidence so pathetic we are compelled to wonder whether he's going insane.

And who better to suggest a mind sliding towards the abyss than Jack Nicholson? He's looking ever more pouchy and grizzled these days (he's 64) and he moves with an almost valetudinarian stiffness, much as he did in his last role for Penn, as the bereaved father in The Crossing Guard. Yet there are isolated flashes of the old devilry, even in the cocking of an eyebrow or the mischievous way he filches police evidence behind a colleague's back (very Jake Gittes) and his muttered disgust over Eckhart's cajoling treatment of the murder suspect ("Jeez, he practically blew him"). Robin Wright Penn also does fine work as the unsuspecting mother; less successful is the heavyweight casting (Vanessa Redgrave, Helen Mirren, Harry Dean Stanton, Mickey Rourke), which would pass muster on a sprawling Altman epic but within the compass of a small picture looks just like what it is – a parade of celebrity cameos.

That's not the film's real problem. The Pledge is the sort of movie that will get fabulous reviews but flunk at the box office, mainly on account of its being very, very slow. There hasn't been a movie murder hunt this clenched and depressive since Bruno Dumont's film Humanité (which Penn may have watched), nor one which so boldly flouted the basic procedures of a criminal investigation. Why didn't the Reno PD match the Del Toro suspect's DNA to the material collected from the murder scene, and thus put the question beyond doubt? Why does the film observe Jerry's early directive about fingerprinting the buttons on the dead girl's coat, and then ignore it completely? The reason, I guess, is that the film is working under false papers: it seems to be a procedural thriller, but it's really an inquiry into spiritual derangement and the tragic forces of fate. The final image confirms this, as eloquent of desolation as that of Gene Hackman blowing his horn amid the stripped apartment in The Conversation.

This is a roundabout way of saying that The Pledge might not make a great Friday night out, even with a mighty Jack Nicholson performance underpinning it. Yes, it could have profited from a little more urgency in its middle section, and perhaps a better final twist, but then, one feels more inclined to praise Sean Penn for making exactly the film he wanted to. He's not going to give us a quick fix – the car chase, the shoot-out – just because every other police movie does. The integrity of his film-making, the absolute commitment to mood, make demands of our patience. Penn pays us the compliment of assuming that we still have any.