THE PLEDGE

Peter Keough

Sean Penn brings to directing much the same finesse with which he punched out paparazzi a few years back -- his work is heartfelt but heavyhanded. He's lightened up a bit in the five years since The Crossing Guard with this adaptation of Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt's sardonic thriller The Promise. Once again Jack Nicholson plays a character tortured by the need for vindication. Here he's Jerry Black, a Nevada lawman who slips away from his retirement party for one last case -- the nasty murder of a little girl. A Native American drifter (Benicio Del Toro in a cartoonish performance) gets pinned with the rap, but Black's not satisfied, and because he promised the victim's mother that he would find the killer, he pursues the case long after it's been closed and his career is over. Although he seems to have started a new life of fishing and raising a family after buying a gas station by a lake and taking in a battered woman (Robin Wright Penn) and her little daughter, he's got a different kind of fishing in mind.

Penn relates the passage of time and the hardening of obsession with some grace, but he undermines it with pie-in-the-face close-ups that don't convey interiority so much as cause distraction (the chip in Wright Penn's tooth, for example, will drive you crazy). Neither do the ubiquitous cameos help -- Sam Shepard, Vanessa Redgrave, Helen Mirren, Mickey Rourke, and Harry Dean Stanton drop by long enough to underscore the artifice beneath Penn's attempt at realism. A film about the contrivance of narrative conventions that ends up being merely contrived, The Pledge lacks polish.