penn
state:
the crossing guard
the indian runner |
director/screenwriter
Sean Penn
producers
David Shamroy Hamburger
Sean Penn
cinematographer
Vilmos Zsigmond
music
Jack Nitzsche
editor
Jay Lash Cassidy
cast
Jack Nicholson (Freddy Gale)
David Morse (John Booth)
Anjelica Huston (Mary)
Robin Wright (Jojo)
Piper Laurie (Helen Booth)
Richard Bradford (Stuart Booth)
Priscilla Barnes (Verna)
Robbie Robertson (Roger)
John Savage (Bobby)
Kari Wuhrer (Mia)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 111m
u.s.
release: 11/16/95
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other sean
penn films
reviewed on this website:
- the
pledge
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In recent years, Jack Nicholson
has pulled himself out of his crowd-pleaser rut. Nicholson spent
much of the '80s coasting; a lot of it was brilliant, entertaining
coasting, to be sure, but audiences came to expect the standard
Jack tricks -- the eyebrows, the insinuating voice that could
read from an ingredients label and make it sound dirty, the wild
and crazy extremes of rage and contempt. When I saw The Shining
on the big screen years after its initial release, once in 1993
and again in 1994, the mostly college-age audience laughed at
everything Nicholson said. They couldn't even wait for him to
go nuts; they cracked up at the stuff he said when he was supposed
to be normal.
Can such an entertainer ever again be taken seriously as an actor
-- as someone who wants you to believe he's someone else? Gradually,
Nicholson has been restoring some purity to his performances,
even if you had to sit through some turkeys to see the restoration.
In the chaotic dud Hoffa, he certainly tried something
different; wearing a false nose that threw his whole face out
of whack, Nicholson embodied Jimmy Hoffa without a trace of the
familiar "Jaaack" -- he was playing a tough, monomaniacal
bastard. (It was certainly a more daring performance than his
audience-tickling mustache-twirling in the contemporaneous A Few Good Men.) In Wolf,
a kind of bookend piece to Carnal Knowledge, Nicholson
showed considerable subtlety and vulnerability. He seemed to
understand that he could no longer play the guy with the biggest
cock on the block -- that it was a lie, a joke. And in The
Crossing Guard, Nicholson unveils what may be his most powerfully
naked performance ever. I'd gladly trade all his strutting in
Batman and A Few Good Men for the heart-stopping
scene in The Crossing Guard when Nicholson, playing a
broken man who's never gotten over the death of his daughter,
makes a late-night call to his ex-wife. Desperate for contact,
for sanity, for anything, he breaks down until his words blur
into a prolonged, anguished wail. It's probably the wildest,
most extreme moment of his career (some members of the audience
will be forced to avert their eyes in shocked embarrassment,
the way some responded to Marlon Brando's comparable moment in
Last Tango in Paris), a major risk that pays off big.
The movie itself, written and directed by Sean Penn, is dark
and literary, sometimes slow, quite often pretentious. I'd be
surprised if Penn's script came in at anything over 80 pages,
because he goes in for a lot of brooding close-ups, as well as
way too much slow-mo -- so much that I felt as if I were underwater.
To be blunt, the movie feels padded and awkward. But the awkwardness
grew on me. Penn is an honest director, as he always is as an
actor. (He could've coasted for years on Jeff Spicoli but didn't.)
I came to value the clumsy moments in which Penn seemed to be
groping for truth and meaning along with the characters. I'd
call him the next John Cassavetes if his movies had Cassavetes'
improvisational spin, but they don't. As a writer, Penn is like
the star student in a fiction-writing class; he presents his
themes neatly, with an artistic plainness. The Crossing Guard
is about men and their guilt, and the women who want to love
them but can't cut through the guilt and self-hatred.
The plot is simple: A grieving father, Freddy Gale (Nicholson),
has sworn to kill John Booth (David Morse), who killed Freddy's
daughter six years ago in a drunk-driving accident. Freddy has
waited all these years for Booth to get out of jail, and when
he does get out, Freddy comes to visit him with a gun. Revenge
will give his life meaning. "I'm a jeweler," Freddy
spits at Booth. "I own a jewelry store. That's who I am.
Do you know what I'm talking about?" Freddy has nothing
except long, boozy nights with his cronies at a strip joint;
he takes the occasional stripper to bed, but they give him no
pleasure -- like booze, they just numb his pain for a while.
Booth, meanwhile, struggles to live with what he did. "I'm
not an unhappy person," he tells his parents. "I'm
a person who has caused unhappiness, who has caused death."
These self-defining moments sum up the best and worst of Penn's
writing: they're too explicit by half, but they give some sense
of the awkwardness of men fighting to understand themselves.
The women who fight to understand the men are a different story.
Penn doesn't neglect them, exactly; the dialogue he gives them
is true, and he doesn't demonize them. And maybe if he'd given
them more screen time The Crossing Guard wouldn't have
been a completely different movie, but it would almost certainly
be a richer, more balanced one. Freddy's ex-wife Mary (Anjelica
Huston, focused and intense in what amounts to a prolonged three-scene
cameo) has hated him since their daughter died; she needed him
to be strong for her, and instead he fell apart and fell away.
Since their divorce, she's remarried and tried to move on --
he hates her for her ability to move on, and she hates him for
his inability to move on. (In six years, Freddy hasn't even been
able to visit the grave.) This is a primal male-female conflict,
and Nicholson and Huston -- who, as we all know, were together
for years before a bitter break -- sink their sharpest teeth
into it. But I could have done with less slow-mo Freddy walking
down the street and more scenes with Mary and her new family
life. Does she, as Freddy suggests, secretly want him to kill
Booth? If so, is Freddy meant to be her id -- the demon consumed
by grief and need, rejecting the comforts of family? The appearance
of Robin Wright as an artist who's uneasily attracted to Booth
likewise raises more questions than it answers. Wright has made
quite a career of getting stuck with screw-ups and psychos (Prince
Humperdinck in The Princess Bride, abusive hippies in
Forrest Gump), so she's equipped
to make us understand why an intelligent woman would want to
get involved with a man with an obvious gallery of flaws -- which
is good, because the script is no help. She's in the movie, basically,
to tell Booth to get over himself and embrace life, not death.
That's the lesson of the movie -- again, perhaps too neatly presented.
But if the scheme of the film is neat, the emotions push it into
something messier and more vital. The two self-loathing men face
each other, and themselves, over the grave of the girl whose
death has deformed them and linked them. Penn takes his time:
The climax is drawn out and lumpy, but also moving, like everything
else in the movie. Penn seals The Crossing Guard with
a gesture that, unlike an identical gesture in the recent Heat, has real resonance. The men, confronted
with the physical fact of the girl's death, realize that nothing
they can do will undo what has been done; they also realize that
their problems go deeper than mourning or guilt. The Crossing
Guard takes us beyond pain and grief into something like
grace.
 The occasion of Penn's sophomore effort
as writer-director is as good a reason as any to seek out The
Indian Runner, his 1991 debut, on video. It's an honorable
and compelling character study, inspired by Bruce Springsteen's
"Highway Patrolman," from his great album Nebraska.
David Morse is Joe Roberts, the highway patrolman whose brother
Frank (Viggo Mortensen) "ain't no good." Frank, a Vietnam
vet and lifelong black sheep, can't help getting into trouble.
"You're the angriest man I know. Why?" Joe asks Frank
near the end. Penn gives Frank a self-justifying monologue in
which he blames the world for his problems; the movie itself,
perhaps surprisingly to those who in 1991 still associated Penn
with his mid-'80s paparazzi-punching days, does not share Frank's
view. Instead, it comes down firmly on the side of stability
and family, and much of it is delicately moving -- it feels as
though Penn is acknowledging that he was once Frank and is now
working hard to be Joe. The movie is a little long (like The
Crossing Guard), and the title figure seems to be grafted
onto the story to give it metaphorical weight. Still an impressive
debut, with detailed performances by Morse and especially Mortensen,
one of the best unsung character actors of his generation. Penn,
who seems refreshingly uninterested in directing himself in a
film, and even less interested in Hollywood formula, may become
-- despite the imperfections in his work, or maybe actually because
of them -- a persuasive reason to stay interested in American
movies as an art form.
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