* * * 1/2 (out of 4)
We all know Sly Jack. Grinning Jack. Smirking Jack with that devil of a twinkle in his gleaming eyes, an eyebrow slightly c*cked. We know R.J. McMurphy and crazy Jack Torrance and the Joker and old Jack Scratch. He’s been playing the role so long, it’s second nature. Jack Nicholson flips it on like a switch, every Oscar night purring through those clever little one-liners. Even with his receding hairline and hulking, porcine frame, that glimmer of a grin still draws audiences like a moth to light.
What’s remarkable about The Pledge, Nicholson’s second collaboration with director Sean Penn after 1995’s emotionally searing The Crossing Guard, is that we ain't faced with the same old Jack. Not at all. Something in the actor-director relationship between Nicholson and Penn allows this Academy Award winning actor to plumb depths he hasn’t hit since his heyday in the ‘70s, and even then Jack was never so sensitive and wounded, so pathetic, raw and sloppy sad.
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Jerry Black is that special role which brings Jack out of his familiar shell, delivering one of his best performances in the past twenty years (his other being wounded lion Freddy Gale in Penn’s Crossing Guard.) This soon-to-retire detective has weathered two unsuccessful marriages, a decent man living inside his own shadow. For years, he’s defined himself through the job - an intuitive, sensitive searcher whose battleground lies in the layers of evidence that accompany brutal crimes.
On his last night with the badge, he should be enjoying his farewell party at a pathetic Hawaiian joint, complete with bad shirts and flower necklaces. Instead, he opts to check out the remains of a dead little girl buried in the ice, the latest in a patterned row of serial child molestations and murders.
Black spends a long, uncompromising winter evening with the blood spattered corpse. His upwardly mobile partner (Aaron Eckhart, In the Company of Men) coaxes a confession from the last man who saw the girl, a mentally retarded drifter (Benicio Del Toro, submerged in the gibbering vowels and feral eyes of this pathetic specimen.) Somehow, Black suspects they haven’t found the right man - and he remembers the fateful pledge he made to the little girl’s mother (Patricia Clarkson), a vow to track down the murderer, no matter what the cost.
