The Best Films of the 2000s, #8: The Pledge (2001)

Directed by Sean Penn; written by Jerzy Kromolowski, based on a book by Friedrich Dürrenmatt; cinematography by Chris Menges
124 mins.; 2.35:1; colour; language: English
At Wikipedia, IMDb (6.9), Metacritic (71)


Jerry Black, a homicide detective is about to retire as the mutilated body of a young girl is found. He is the one who tells the dead girls parents the bad news and her mother makes him swear to find the killer. Soon a suspect is arrested, a mentally retarded man who sort of admits to the murder before killing himself. Jerry doesn't believe the dead man was the killer, but is told in decreasingly uncertain terms that he is now retired and the case is closed. He (a) lets it go and spends the rest of his days gardening or (b) can't forget the pledge he made and tries to find the real killer? Come on, make a guess!

The film's plot has a somewhat winding history: The screenplay for the 1958 German mystery Es geschah am hellichten Tag (recommended!) was written by Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt. However, he thought that the story was too obedient to the conventions of the genre and reworked it into a novella with the telling title Das Versprechen: Requiem auf den Kriminalroman, adequately translated into English as The Pledge: Requiem for the Detective Novel. Which is the source for this film.

It's a bit hard to explain why this film is great. For one, it doesn't have any weaknesses one might point out, which you can't say about most films. It also has the finest Jack Nicholson performance I've ever seen, and I've seen quite a few. But maybe the key lies in the trailer?



Like no other trailer before it, the clip tries to make it look (and sound!) as though the film becomes all fast and shocking and dramatic towards the end. I think even if you haven't seen the film but look at the trailer really closely, you can see it's a pretty desperate effort: He's taking a gun! He's talking to someone! The truth is that the ending of the film isn't like that at all. Slowly and painfully it grinds to an end. In that it is violating the rules of its genre more clearly than Dürrenmatt's novella ever did.

That may still not make it sound like a great movie, but that's the best I can come up with. Alternatively, maybe all the people who thought it was so-so are right. But I doubt it.