Bitter and Sweet.(Review)

When, in 1957, the Swiss playwright and novelist Friedrich Durrenmatt wrote his novella Das Versprechen (The Pledge), he subtitled it Requiem for the Crime Novel. It has a framing story: A retired Zurich police chief reminisces to Durrenmatt, author of thrillers, about a poor, semidemented gas-station operator, waiting for someone the fellow keeps insisting will come. This wreck of a man is the former inspector Matthai, once the chief's most gifted sleuth.

Years ago, when he was about to retire, Matthai was nevertheless drawn into the case of a murdered 14-year-old girl found in the bushes. In the movie version of The Pledge, directed by Sean Penn, the girl becomes an eight-year-old who was also raped, which, presumably, makes things more interesting for American moviegoers. The screenwriters, the Pole Jerzy Kromolowski and his American wife, Mary Olson-Kromolowski, met as students at the University of Copenhagen, and have had fetchingly motley careers.

These are no garden-variety scenarists. Their script, transposing the action to the vicinity of Reno, and greatly expanding the novella while remaining faithful to its essence, is far superior to Penn's two previous directorial ventures, Indian Runner and The Crossing Guard. Matthai has become detective Jerry Black (Jack Nicholson), who likewise promises the victim's distraught mother that he'll find the killer, and goes to almost insane lengths to do it. The process whereby a fellow cop (the good Aaron Eckhart) extracts a confession from a retarded Indian (the always fascinating Benicio Del Toro) is as subduedly harrowing as a scene can get, and the fanatical way Jerry, disbelieving the confession, goes on his epic wild-goose chase is riveting. This may indeed be Jack Nicholson's crowning performance. The actor's naturally ogival eyebrows, looking like naves of mini-cathedrals, his forehead crisscrossed by lines as if for a game of tic-tac-toe, the gaze alternately cozy and perforating, the mustache rugged, the receding hair hedgehoggishly erect-all this cuts deep. And then there is his mercurial, moving performance.

Penn has directed artfully, but, this time, not artily, and in Chris Menges he has a cinematographer who can make nature as poetic as Durrenmatt described it. Everyone acts compellingly, not least Sam Shepard as Jerry's boss, and Lois Smith in an all-too-tiny role. That said, I can't help wondering what those Brits are doing in Nevada: Vanessa Redgrave, as the victim's grandmother who spouts an accent no one ever heard before; Helen Mirren as the psychiatrist who remains unabashedly British. As the prostitute in the novel-upgraded in the movie to a husband-battered waitress-Robin Wright Penn (Mrs. Sean Penn in real life) does nicely, as does also little Pauline Roberts as her daughter and Jerry's lure for the killer.

The worthwhile point is that no matter how astute and thorough the detective, chance can trip him up (yet why this should be a requiem for the crime novel, I don't know). It makes a haunting movie, though, even if the ending is deliberately ...