Sean Penn (1995)

It’s clear from the start that the death of a child has occurred.  Legends on the screen introduce ‘The Father’ (Jack Nicholson) and ‘The Mother’ (Anjelica Huston).  She is attending a support group for the bereaved.  He is in the audience at an ‘exotic dancing’ club (striptease, pole-dancing).  Then we meet John Booth (David Morse), imprisoned for five years for manslaughter, the caption says.  We notice his scarred forehead and an immediate flashback shows him bashing his head against the bars of his cell to cause the damage that left the scars.   Sean Penn takes his time to reveal the details of the death which led Freddy and Mary Gale and Booth to their circumstances at the start of the film.  It transpires that Emily, the seven-year-old daughter of the Gales, was knocked down and killed, and that Booth was the drunk driver who caused her death.   The title of the picture refers to Freddy’s recurring nightmare of children, including Emily, being escorted across a road by a ‘crossing guard’ who is John Booth.  (It struck me as a pity that Americans don’t use the phrase ‘lollipop man’, which would have been more colourfully ambiguous.)  The story begins when Booth is released from prison – an event relished more by Freddy Gale, who runs a Los Angeles jewellery business, than by Booth himself, who is so mired in guilt that turning over a new leaf is inconceivable to him.  Freddy, on the other hand, has been waiting for Booth to be a free man again:  he’s determined to kill him.

The Pledge is the only one of the five films Penn has so far directed – four full-length pictures and the segment for 11’ 09’ 01’ – which he hasn’t also written and it’s by some way the best of those I’ve seen (which don’t include his debut, The Indian Runner).  The Crossing Guard is a bad piece of writing in terms of both dialogue and dramatic structure.  The first exchange between Freddy and Mary, who’ve split up as a result of Emily’s death, is briefly promising.  He visits her, in their old house which she now shares with a new husband and her and Freddy’s young sons, to announce that Booth is out of jail.  He tells her she looks ‘wonderful’.  She replies with amused ruefulness:  ‘Wonderful would be pushing it a bit’.  Later in the conversation, when Mary tells Freddy that her and her husband’s business is going well, Freddy replies, ‘That’s wonderful’ – and you realise ‘wonderful’ is his watchword for the occasion, the means of being civil before he reminds Mary that he plans to kill Booth.

But this is a rare moment of subtlety in the writing.  Penn is more often inclined to a flashy line that isn’t followed through (at a party Booth says, ‘I think freedom is overrated …’ and Penn cuts away before any of the guests can really probe the remark) or a clumsy feed (when Booth tells JoJo, an artist he meets at the same party and with whom he then has a brief relationship, how his forehead got scarred she says, ‘Because you couldn’t stand prison?’ just so that he can deliver the punchline, ‘No, because I couldn’t stand me’).  Booth describes Emily’s death to JoJo in a way that’s too objectively detailed (especially since he was drunk at the time – and there’s no indication that he was suddenly shocked into mental clarity).  As things get worse for him, Freddy spends more and more nights at the club.  The other men he drinks with in the audience there are presented merely as lustful slobs.  There’s not the faintest suggestion that any of them might have a backstory that explains their behaviour in the way his daughter’s death is supposed to account entirely for Freddy’s.

In The Pledge, his third feature, Penn achieved something very unusual – he got an excellent performance from Jack Nicholson in a role which allowed him very few opportunities to be ‘up’.   Penn evidently learned a lot from directing Nicholson in The Crossing Guard because nearly everything about his acting here, as another essentially miserable character, feels wrong.   Whenever Freddy is gloomy, Nicholson is uncomfortable and unconvincing – he seems to be trying to suppress his natural vitality as a performer.    Whenever Freddy is able to let rip, the actor’s relief is palpable and he’s mostly over the top.  In the scene in which Freddy visits Mary to tell her the ‘good news’ that Booth’s been released, it would express his lethal obsession much more effectively if he really did appear to regard this as good news:  Nicholson seems miles away from getting on the character’s wavelength at this point.  There are a couple of moments of emotional breakdown where he can push himself and which are undeniably strong (particularly a panicked mid-night phone call to Mary).  Sequences in which Freddy is shown simply walking in a busy street work well because Nicholson is able to suggest just another LA commuter and to fascinate you because he’s Jack Nicholson.

All in all, though, the director’s attitude towards his star here seems too uncritically admiring.  Penn doesn’t do enough to control Nicholson.  John Booth is so stupefied by his guilt that, when Freddy first breaks into the trailer where Booth is living outside his parents’ house and threatens to shoot him, Booth is completely calm.  He simply asks Freddy to give him a three-day reprieve – enough time for Booth to confirm to himself that life isn’t worth living.  David Morse plays the part with consistency and integrity – but the portrait feels preconceived:   Booth is locked into his remorse to the extent that he can’t even express it.   (As Sally said, you can’t help wondering too if Penn encouraged Morse to do the character this way in order not to get in Nicholson’s way centre stage.)

Anjelica Huston manages to be both witty and affecting as Mary but it’s a poor role – her lines are nearly uninterrupted cliché – and an example of the variously insulting treatment of women in the film.  Piper Laurie, although she makes her usual strong impression, has virtually nothing to do as Booth’s mother.   Robin Wright is lovely as the nobly sympathetic JoJo but Penn shoots Wright so adoringly (the couple already had a child at the time and married in 1996) that it’s irritating – especially given how he presents the girls at the club.  The one exception there is a prostitute called Mia (Kari Wuhrer), who cares about but is rejected by Freddy:  she’s treated in the condescending and sentimental way that’s standard for a tart-with-a-heart character.    Neither JoJo nor Mia can get through to the men that matter to them because Freddy and Booth are monomaniacs.  This might seem like nothing more than uninspired rhyming in the screenplay but I think it also hints at something larger that I find offputting about Sean Penn’s sensibility as a film-maker.   He has a penchant for romanticising extreme male experience and for implying that the strength of the obsessions of the men concerned makes it impossible for the women in their lives to reach them.  Penn seems to assume that suffering guarantees depth.  He achieves that in The Pledge but The Crossing Guard, like Into the Wild, comes across as wallowing in the shallows.   (He also seems to be drawn to stories involving the killing of a child.  That’s also the subject of The Pledge.  In Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, Penn plays a vengeful father whose daughter has been murdered.)

The parallel and converging stories of Freddy and Booth are schematic:  you know the film must lead to a conclusive encounter between the two men but The Crossing Guard has very little momentum for much of its 111 minutes.  Penn cross-cuts between the party which Booth’s friend lays on for him, where he meets JoJo, and Freddy’s evening at the club followed by the one-night-stand with Mia  – but there’s not much going on in either sequence, and no synergy between them.  Most of the very protracted climax is either glibly ironic (Freddy is pulled over for drunk driving) or absurd (in Booth’s pursuit of Freddy, Jack Nicholson proves to be a surprisingly strong athlete with stamina as well as sprinting ability).   The best bit of the last part of the picture is an intense conversation between a woman and a man on a bus which the two protagonists get on during the chase.  Penn conveys how the insistent niggling of the woman is going on in the background of both Freddy’s and Booth’s experience of the moment.   The worst bit is the final sequence:  the two men end up in the cemetery where Emily is buried, and which Freddy has never had the nerve to visit. Both at the end of their tether, Freddy Gale and John Booth are reconciled – and, we assume, ‘move on’ – and Penn is shameless enough to have Vilmos Zsigmond photograph a sunrise over LA to bring things to an uplifting close. It has to be admitted that the new dawn does come as a relief:  it’s been a very long night for everyone.

6 January 2010