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The Pledge
According to the film trades, director Sean Penn fought bitterly for months with Warner Brothers about how to release The Pledge.
Penn had warned that this wasn't a mainstream Hollywood movie, aimed at megaplex crowds accustomed to such movie verities as warm characters and happy endings.
Penn wanted the movie released slowly, as an art film, so it would have time to build and find its audience, so people would be prepared for it.
The danger, he cautioned, was that people would flock to The Pledge thinking it a showcase for just another Nicholson tough-guy performance, as in A Few Good Men.
Assuming Penn did argue this way, he was right. But he lost the fight against the dependably venal Hollywood studio execs, who wanted the movie released as widely as possible before people realized how brilliantly unconventional and depressing it is. Trailers for The Pledge were blatantly misleading, suggesting a cop-on-the-trail-of-a-vicious-killer adventure ("I made a promise!") In the two theaters where I saw the movie, people had obviously been fooled, and there were lots of squirming kids.
As a result, unprepared audiences are reportedly struggling with this chilling movie, which is not lighting up at the box office, as Sean foresaw.
The Pledge is an anti-mainstream mainstream movie.
Faithful in spirit to the story written by the broody Swiss novelist Friedrich Durrenmatt, it's told in an almost European style (they can make bleak movies there) free of formulaic marketing notions of how much grimness American ticket-buyers can bear and will pay for. In the U.S., the idea seems to be that movies are an escape from reality, not a portrayal of it.
The Pledge conjures up Atom Egoyan's wonderful but determinedly grim The Sweet Hereafter, released in l997. That movie was marketed just the way Penn wanted The Pledge to be -- in small theaters in selected cities. It exceeded expectations, whereas The Pledge can't possibly succeed as the blockbuster Warner Brothers pretended it would be.
This is a haunting movie about isolation, obsession, aging and madness. Nicholson delivers one of the great performances of his life as retiring Reno police detective Jerry Black, who leaves his own retirement party to investigate the murder-mutilation of a little girl and, in more than one sense, never comes back.
Black becomes obsessed with the idea that a vicious rapist-murderer is stalking young blonde schoolgirls who wear red dresses. His ex-colleagues believe the murders have been solved and that he's going crazy and getting senile.
Black buys an old gas station and bait shop at the epicenter of the area where the victims have vanished or been murdered. Though he poses as a retired cop who is now an angler, it gradually becomes clear to the audience that he's anything but retired, that he is honoring his pledge on his "eternal salvation" to the mother of one of the victims: he will find the killer. A host of top-notch actors drop in briefly and shine while they do: Vanessa Redgrave, Robin Wright Penn, Sam Shepard, Aaron Eckhart, Helen Mirren, Mickey Rourke.
Don't expect a light-hearted moment in this movie -- the colors are muted, the climate harsh and forbidding. The open shot is eerie and depressing and it just gets worse. There is an incredibly powerful cinematic moment on a turkey farm where parents learn their daughter has been slaughtered. Nicholson incorporates loneliness and alienation into his language, facial expressions and body posture. He is wrestling with all sorts of demons, from retirement and aging to the kind of obsession that seems credible for a conscientious detective in these circumstances.
Nicholson's detective visibly begins to wear under the strains of his life. He looks grizzled, chain-smokes, walks stiffly, forgets words and thoughts. Gradually -- in the kind of plot development unimaginable in most mainstream Hollywood films -- we come to realize that he is prepared to make any sacrifice, including any chance at a new life, and the people he most loves, to bring the killer to justice.
The movie has trouble ending, and gets a bit improbable. And even the most discriminating movie-lovers aren't always psychically prepared for a movie as unsparing as this one. You keep expecting the film to lighten up, to give us a ray of hope, for the Nicholson character to get on with his life, to see the light, for justice to prevail. But Penn has gone for unyielding honesty and fidelity to a story.
Like The Sweet Hereafter, -- whose influences seem distinctly present here -- the movie's message is that life is a real horror sometimes and, as one character points out, God can be greedy. There are devils out there, as Detective Black tells the bereaved mother. But if you can handle The Pledge -- the (minimal) gore isn't the problem here, but the truth behind it -- you won't regret it. It's a beautiful, worthwhile and fascinating movie, the kind Hollywood isn't supposed to make anymore.
Wow, a First Post.
One can consider a hollywood film to be an extended phenotype. It is the modern extension of our instinct to tell stories and educate of old, but stripped of any real worthwhile qualities. If only Hollywood were not dominated by commercial concerns, and existed to create good films for their own sake, I don't think this vacancy and and the other problems I have mentioned would be a problem.
The United Kingdom has, of late, set up a highly succesful method of making films which is government funded, though indirectly. Government owned television stations, such as Channel 4, make excellent films such as Trainspotting, Shallow Grave and 4 Weddings and a Funeral. These films are designed to be good to watch, not to make money. And they represent the true counterculture sweeping the film world from Europe (Dogme 95 is another example).
It would be good if America, through PBS, were to implement a similar profit free, for the love of it system. It would give us some innovative and interesting films, and a relief from Hollywood.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
A college football team faces a new coach and interpersonal conficts, as well as personal problems for individual team members. They fight their way through close games with larger schools all the way to the BIG Game... which they lose because this movie is about the other team and their personal challenges and triumphs.
A fucked up and misogynistic teenager manipulates and occasionally date rapes teen girls until he either 1) gets the shit kicked out of him by one's older brother, 2) gets send to JV and sexually assaulted by an older boy, 3) gets aids and dies a nasty death because he doesn't get tested and find out the truth until its too late, 4) we don't know because this is a "gritty realistic" movie that ends after only one day during which he didn't suffer any consequences.
Every story is a little slice. There are very few movies where you couldn't play the "well, if this was THEIR movie" game and see it completely differently. The thing is that a couple of centuries (if not millenia) of writers have had the intelligence to know who they are writing for and pick the slice and the endpoint that their readers/viewers are looking for and will enjoy the most. The greek tragedies were just what they said. They were no more "realistic" in their morbidity than the comedies were in their expansive happy endings. They were just written for different audiences and expectations.
So if I as a reader/veiwer enjoy one kind of ending point, and find another to be unneccassarily depressing or for that matter find that that particular slice isn't one I will spend my recreational time on, I no more deserve to be told that I "can't handle the realism" or "want a holywood ending" than the guy who hates romantic films and wants the "holywood ending" of lots of violence and gore.
I doubt The Pledge is any more unflinchingly realistic than When Harry Met Sally. Its just picking a side of a story that most people don't find enjoyable. If it can pull it off, great, but if it fails thats its fault as a movie, not ours as veiwers.
Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
The film is devestating, its vision of humanity as bleak as anything in thirty years.
Aesthetically, it's very compelling -- highly nuanced performances by Jack Nicholson and Robin Wright Penn being its strongest points.
The tension is managed perfectly. I found it, at times, nearly unbearable.
In terms of the script, which, as you might expect from a film directed by Penn, is literate beyond reproach, I think it's worth noting that this novel adaptation is strikingly different from much recent Hollywood fare not only because it's terribly dark. It's also a portrait of psychological repression -- a theme that informed much of the best mid-century American and British cinema (think Hitchcock, Kazan, Preminger, et. al) as well as film noir, but which became passé the further Hollywood in the 70s and 80s moved from examining character and instead toward embracing sensation (for which you can thank Messrs. Spielberg, Lucas, etc.). This would be of limited interest were not the entire story dependent upon what Nicholson's character hiding the truth from himself...
There is another enormously powerful subject here, too: the effect of police work upon the police. What happens when you see too much evil? With our cinema too much given over to the triumphalism and cartoonish representations of cops in Drug War America, this is a subject begging to be explored.
The final shots of the film may leave you in agony. Beware, casual moviegoers! This isn't the spookhouse make-believe of "Hannibal." Real monsters are much scarier.