Romance blossoms between an abused wife and mother (Robin Wright Penn) and retiring police detective Jerry Black (Jack Nicholson) in The Pledge.

Sean Penn is a terrific actor, and his respect for actors is obvious in his limited work as a director. In his current film, The Pledge, Penn peoples his cast with a dazzling lineup of great actors including Vanessa Redgrave, Helen Mirren and Harry Dean Stanton in mere cameos. More important, in his film’s forefront Penn gives Jack Nicholson his first role since winning an Oscar for As Good as it Gets and a straight dramatic role with as many interesting dimensions as Nicholson has had in some time. The Pledge is the story of Nevada police detective Jerry Black (Nicholson), who catches one last case on the very evening of his retirement party. An 8-year-old girl has been sexually violated and murdered, and though Jerry lacks either a suspect or a lead, he promises the child’s distraught mother (New Orleans’ Patricia Clarkson) that he will catch the killer. An ambitious young detective named Stan Krolak (Aaron Eckhart) coerces a confession from a mentally retarded Indian (Benicio Del Toro), but Jerry is never convinced the suspect ever understood the charges against him.

  Twice divorced and a habitual loner, Jerry tries to concentrate on fishing after he retires. But he keeps drifting back to the case and gradually begins to assemble a series of clues. In part for a daily activity, in partial hopes of catching a glimpse of the killer he has come to believe drives a black station wagon, Jerry buys a dusty crossroads filling station and begins to eye his customers with analytical suspicion. Two rays of sunshine fall into Jerry’s gloomy life when he makes the acquaintance of a bartender named Lori (Robin Wright Penn) and her pretty 8-year-old daughter Chrissy (Pauline Roberts). The relationship with Lori develops nicely. Jerry protects her from an abusive husband. They start living together without a hint of romance. And when Lori falls for his decency, she touches our hearts, just as Jerry does when he reveals his surprise and wonder that an attractive younger woman might respond to him sexually. Nicholson is at his best in a commanding performance when he reveals Jerry’s tenderness, unease and hunger all in the same moment.

  Jerry and Lori and Chrissy begin to live as a family, Jerry taking over duties of reading Chrissy to sleep and caring for her after school. Jerry’s evident devotion to Chrissy, though, fuels his obsession with catching the pedophilic killer he believes still at large. And when Chrissy relates having met a man who fits the murderer’s description and profile, Jerry can barely contain his frenzy.

  At this point, unfortunately, The Pledge loses its narrative clarity, and what follows feels forced and ill-constructed. We can buy Detective Krolak’s skepticism, but neither of his responses to Jerry’s request for help proceeds from his established attitude. Comparably, Lori’s reaction to Jerry’s attempt to trap the killer seems hasty and far too unhesitant and uncomplicated. The film’s ultimate resolution embraces a pessimism about the human condition without basing that dark view satisfactorily in the characters it has created. The power of its performances makes The Pledge worth watching, but only at the price of a certain disappointment. .They have turned our cities into shooting galleries. Yes, we need to fight the tragedy of addiction that has left a legacy of heartache in the wake of the briefest artificial pleasure. Yes, drug dealers are monsters. But weneed to face up to the fact that what we’ve been doing for the last quarter century isn’t working. Drugs are cheaper, more plentiful and more potent today than they were when the "war on drugs" commenced. Traffic hardly makes this point directly, butfew thinking viewers will fail to conclude that decriminalizing drug use is an optionwe ought to give serious consideration.