(2001) A murder mystery from director/co-producer Sean Penn, veiled in atmospheric music and mountains, insinuations and innuendo, based on Friedrich Dürrenmatt's novel. With the approach of Christmas, as the Becker County sheriff's department in Reno, Nevada, gives homicide detective Jerry Black (Jack Nicholson) a "Gone Fishing" retirement party, the body of second-grader Ginny Larsen is found by a kid on a snowmobile.

Jerry accepts responsibility for telling Duane and Margaret Larsen (Patricia Clarkson) that their little girl had been raped and her throat slashed; Mrs Larsen makes him promise (evil in itself to impose such a pledge) that he will find the murderer: "Do you promise that you will … by your soul's salvation?"

Using the boy's identification of an Indian with long, dark hair running away, leaving the scene in a maroon pickup truck, the police collar Toby Jay Wadenah (Benicio Del Toro). The suspect, a trapper, has a rap sheet with rape of a 16-year-old girl and grand theft; he's also mentally handicapped. In an isolation cell as Jerry and Eric Pollack (Sam Shepard) watch, detective Stan Krolak (Aaron Eckart) interrogates Toby - "You mean you were trapping beaver or 'beaver' … pussy?" - getting a confession: "I killed her." Chocolate-candy wrappers were found in the Indian's truck; the coroner reports chocolates in the girl's stomach. No rape-kit evidence mentioned, the case is closed with prisoner's death.

Changing his mind in the airport before he was to get on a flight to fish for marlin in Baja, Jerry has a hunch that Toby wasn't the killer. He interviews the grandmother, Annalise Hansen (Vanessa Redgrave), who tells of having taught Ginny piano and read her Hans Christian Andersen stories such as "The Angel" - "How could God be so greedy?" - and a classmate, Betsy Fiske, who says that Ginny told her a story of a giant she knew and called the Wizard who gave her porcupines, an image (tall Caucasian male) of which Ginny had drawn.

Jerry's request of a system-wide search for similar homicides produces a murder in Monash County eight years earlier of a 10-year-old blonde in a red dress and a missing nine-year-old blonde in a red dress three years back. Eric and Stan, seeing nothing more than coincidences in the cases, urge Jerry to get a life, go fish, begin his retirement. Later after giving Jerry the benefit of the doubt, Stan will conclude after a fruitless stakeout: "He's become a drunk and a clown."

Baptized but not a church-going Christian, Jerry goes angling, but not just for fish. As if on impulse in an isolated town, he purchases a gas station and house from Floyd Cage (Harry Dean Stanton), then watches for black stationwagons; and in hopes of getting help at interpreting clues, he shares Ginny's drawing with a psychologist (Helen Mirren), who asks him, after pointing out that the picture may be nothing more than a "product of a seven-year-old's imagination": "Are you still sexually active? Do you hear voices?"

The camera often directs our attention to clocks and watches: time's passing as Jerry expects another assault. He sees the Larsens in town (Duane is a tall man). Noticing the blonde little girl of the restaurant owner, Jerry takes an interest in both divorced mother Lori and daughter Chrissy (Pauline Roberts), inviting them to take refuge in his house after Lori's ex-spouse strikes her. Setting up a swingset in the front yard beside the road, Jerry seems to be using Chrissy as bait for his trap; Gary Jackson (Tom Noonan) nibbles, stopping in his yellow dump truck to ask Chrissy if she knows the Word. Enjoying Jerry's reading her Andersen's fairytales at bedtime, Chrissy whispers: "I met the Wizard today."

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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