A grizzled, weather-beaten retiree and once a police detective in a hinterland of Nevada, Jerry Black is on the cusp of life-changing events. On the night of his surprise retirement party, his replacement (played by Aaron Eckhart with a clean-shaven, big-chinned impudence) leaves the party on a call—a girl, found in a snowy woodland earlier that day, has been raped and murdered. Unable to resist, Jerry asks to go along, hoping to get in a final evening of that old, glorious vigor of the chase, the crime, the resolution.
With the murdered girl found in the snow begins the long and torturous demise of a once-competent detective, played by Jack Nicholson with so much seething, burned-out determination that what seems at first honest behavior becomes a roll in the mud for his former glory, which wants nothing more than that he should catch the bad guy, and so vindicate the pledge that has lost its sanctity and its purpose. His attachment to this former glory that has lapsed, gone out of style, grown old, is his demise; all else from that pathological attachment proceeds as though it were a modern fable, as of Oedipus whose fate has been foreordained.
While Jack Nicholson plays out all the moments of his descent into insanity with an undeniable competence, The Pledge has serious flaws: its technique of showing Jerry Black’s deterioration, invoking flashes of photographed thought and extraneous voices that draw out his descent into psychosis, is somewhat showy and heavy-handed; its script and atmosphere impose on the otherwise competent Nicholson a gravity that is all but humorless, and sometimes even derisory (as when Margaret Larsen, played by the tearful Patricia Clarkson, cows him into the pledge on which his behavior is supposed to hinge—is this pious hocus-pocus really the mainspring of all that follows? It is a defective moment, as though Nicholson were a schoolboy admonished by his mother); and the lead-up to the final scenes of his deterioration are too abrupt, and too lubricated by alcohol—no other suggestion that he drinks to excess exists in the film, except that he’s guzzling it down in the final scene, as though to solidify his psychosis. It is less than convincing.
The plot points in The Pledge are as substantial as those of In a Lonely Place, in which Bogart’s character flaws are revealed alongside all the details of a murder in which he has been implicated, and which turns out to have had none of the importance that it once had. Like Jack Nicholson, Bogart turns out to be his own demise, irrespective of the outcome of the murder case; The Pledge is in this aspect successful, in that it hints at the actual murderer while making this point superfluous to the obvious flaws of Jerry Black, whose own condition would have been deferred, rather than cured, by the murderer-nabbing.
But while In a Lonely Place has the convincing foil of Gloria Grahame, and the long-established tendencies of the dark, jaded persona of Bogart, The Pledge has only the charm of Nicholson, whose depth as an actor is not as well-served as it could have been, and a host of other excellent actors that are underused. And so The Pledge is a flawed but worthwhile experience, one that provides its own brand of slipshod competence lacking the kind of depth expected from this ensemble of actors.
