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The Crossing Guard
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As a director emerging in the 1990s, Sean
Penn swiftly became a big headache for the American film industry. His movies
are unrelentingly tough, dark and extreme. They court charges of absurdity and
excess – at least in conventional filmic terms – because he dares to follow in
the footsteps of the American cinema’s most demanding master: John Cassavetes.
I believe there are only two American
directors today who are working, quite consciously, in the Cassavetes
tradition: Penn and Abel Ferrara. Penn’s The Crossing Guard is a true Cassavetes
homage, and it reminded me of the qualities in the Master’s work that are at
the same time the most radical and also the most difficult.
The
Crossing Guard is dark and uncompromising. There is a high level of unreality and
unbelievability to it, as there is to some Cassavetes films. Penn’s drama
(which he also scripted) comes across as an intense, obsessive, internal
fantasy, a dream-story that obeys the (loose) rules of neither naturalism nor expressionism.
To even summarise its plot of runs the risk of instantly opening it to ridicule
it for its odd, floating absurdities.
But plot counts for very little here. In
essence, it’s about a tormented guy, Freddy (Jack Nicholson). We learn that his
marriage to Mary (Anjelica Huston) busted up after the death of their child
Emily, who was killed in a hit-and-run accident. When the film begins, Freddy
is counting down the moments until the killer, Booth (David Morse), gets out of
jail. Freddy now lives for one thing and one thing only – and that is to kill
Booth, shoot him down in cold blood.
There’s a scene where Freddy bursts into
Mary’s home – she’s remarried now, and has custody of their kids – to announce
his murderous plan. The unresolved emotions of the situation get ugly and
dysfunctional, and it ends with Freddy predicting to Mary that she’ll feel
“pride and relief” when he commits his deed.
All the same, even though murder is the
main thing on on Freddy’s mind, Penn delays the inevitable showdown for as long
as possible. [2022 note: A variation on this plot, ex-wife included, and a
further attenuation of the suspense-principle, appears in the Dardennes’
remarkable The Son [2002] – and
recall that the Dardennes missed out on the adaptation rights to Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, filmed by Clint Eastwood in 2003 and featuring Penn in the
cast.]
Freddy is among the tortured zombie-men of
modern American cinema, a sleepwalker like the anti-heroes of Paul Schrader’s Light Sleeper (1992) or Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992). The path he chooses and the
time he takes to get to his ultimate gesture are puzzlingly nonsensical, at
least for some stick-in-the-mud moviegoers. Mostly, The Crossing Guard just drifts, alternating between glimpses of the
parallel lives of Freddy and Booth. The alternation, including the precisely enigmatic
points where Penn chooses to cross over from one life-portrait to the other, is
very Cassavetes (as in the first enigmatic section of Love Streams, 1984). And equally Cassavetes-esque is the particular
way that Freddy spends his days or, rather, his nights: in a drunken haze,
making out with strippers from a tawdry bar in sleazy rooms (recalling The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, 1976/1978).
The most profound homage that Penn pays to
his mentor, however, is to be found in the film’s emotional tone. Watching The Crossing Guard, I realised that what
makes Cassavetes’ own films so off-the-ground, so suspended and unreal, is the
presence of only one kind of emotional tone, from first moment to last. The
only emotions, the only interpersonal encounters that matter to Cassavetes are
the intense, deep, scarring ones – for him, these are seemingly the only authentic emotions and encounters. Any
character in his films who can’t get onto that intense plane is instantly
dismissed as a boob, an inauthentic, dreary role-player.
The
Crossing Guard holds to this supremely exigent emotional principle. There are almost no light,
throwaway moments in the story, no concessions to mere entertainment. It is as
if Penn has decided to strip away the slightest trace of comforting, relaxed
whimsy. Every scene has to be a confrontation with Truth, an excavation of the
soul, a long and pained look into the hard, unfinished business inside everybody’s
heart.
So we see Freddy in tears, phoning his
ex-wife after a horrendous, psychodramatic nightmare; and Booth going to a
party after his release from prison, which is more like a therapy session than
a good time. Sex scenes range from sombre to bleak.
We see a vivid interaction between Booth
and his tentative lover, the soulful JoJo (Robin Wright). He shows up at her
apartment. They don’t say much, and what they do manage to say is difficult and
weighty, something to do with guilt and intimacy. She puts on some music and
invites him to dance. He turns off the music, and goes to leave. There’s a
sudden embrace, somewhere between eroticism and violence.
And then Freddy departs, just as abruptly
and disconcertingly as he arrived – and, as he does so, he tells JoJo to keep
dancing. And that is exactly what she does, the gestures of her body in this
slow-motion moment speaking so much about the dream of human connection, and
the constant likelihood of its total oblivion. (In general, Penn is over-fond
of hitting the slow-motion button in order to lend existential gravity to the
simplest gestures of daily life.)
This reaching for authentic drama and
emotion at all times is also a demand that Penn must make of his actors. It’s deeply
moving to watch Jack Nicholson in absolutely the least glamorous, least hammy,
least flattering (to him or us) role of his career. Here, he gets back down to
a level where he has rarely been since Bob Rafelson’s The King of Marvin Gardens (1972). Huston, with a permanent tear in
her eye as she faces this vast wreck of a man, is equally compelling. And Morse,
who has a pretty mysterious character to play in Booth, has the quality of
Harvey Keitel at his brooding best: poised like some beautiful animal on the
outside, while turbulent and troubled on the inside.
Ultimately, The Crossing Guard is about the trials of the masculine psyche –
and, on this plane, it’s more like Ferrara than Cassavetes. Penn cuts
obsessively between the haunted Freddy and the guilty Booth because they exist
in some kind of masculine symbiosis, two cast-off pieces of the same bleeding
heart. It can seem absurd how these two men endlessly stalk, circle and moon
around each other – even when the guns come out for the finale.
But that’s because they need the time, the
passage, the ritual or ceremony to grasp even just a little what their
individual pain is, and how their respective dark nights of the soul are
connected. I know it sounds like some demented Men’s Movement tract, with its
therapeutic stress on grief, working-through and reconciliation – and there is
unquestionably a trace of that in The Crossing Guard. But, in a very
real sense, such criticisms are mere carping.
Penn is an admirable and indispensable
figure because he ventures into risky territory that few filmmakers dare to
trod. The emotions that this journey produces are searing and intense.
Fashionable or not, sophisticated or not, the vision of masculine angst given
to us by Penn has a real force and passion.
2022 Postscript: After
his first two films, The Indian Runner (1991) and The Crossing Guard, I had high hopes for
Sean Penn as a filmmaker. His subsequent work, The Pledge, already
showed signs of calcification in his repetitious ‘manner’ of merging style and story. Into the Wild (2007), The Last Face (2016) and Flag Day (2021)
have only hastened this creative decline, as did his weird novel, Bob Honey
Who Just Do Stuff (2018). His small role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice
Pizza (2021) is, however, a joy to behold.
MORE Penn: She's So Lovely © Adrian Martin June 1996 |
