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Jack's Gale Force

Coping: Jack Nicholson and friends in "The Crossing Guard"

In 'The Crossing Guard,' people pick up guns for real reasons

By Allen Barra

Sean Penn's new movie (as director and writer), The Crossing Guard, has been the subject of much "bad buzz" in the film industry, which means one thing: no commercial prospects. And "no commercial prospects" generally means the film wasn't made on an assembly line, so nobody knows how to market it.

It doesn't matter to me that The Crossing Guard has bad marketing prospects, and it shouldn't matter to you. The Crossing Guard is a real movie, not a contrived, sentimental tearjerker or a laboratory-concocted action clone. When it's clicking, you can feel the intensity you only get from people who really care about their material.

Freddy Gale (Jack Nicholson) is a middle-aged jeweler whose life is irreversibly changed when his seven-year-old daughter is killed by a drunk driver. Freddy can't handle the loss, and he starts to obsess over John Booth (David Morse), the man responsible for his daughter's death, until, piece by piece, his life unravels.

The film opens with shots of Freddy and his pals at a strip joint, then cuts to his ex-wife, Mary (Anjelica Huston), at an encounter group; both are coping in their own ways. The difference is that Mary has remarried and raised their two sons, but Freddy is a walking time bomb, driving around with a loaded gun in his glove compartment, counting the days until Booth is released from jail.

Nicholson has played so many nut cases in the last three years that there is a tendency to gloss over his performances. His Freddy Gale is animated from the inside. He truly seems like a man who once felt he had control of his life and who simply cannot adjust to the consequences of an irrational tragedy--as a jeweler, a man who deals every day with precision, there's no room in his world view for the irrational.

For once, there's a reason for the madness of a Nicholson character. During a shouting match, for instance, Mary tells Freddy that he can't cope with the realization that he was never a good father in the first place (their exchanges are filled with poisonous barbs--they know each other's weak spots too well).

What really propels The Crossing Guard, though, isn't Freddy's fixation with revenge but its juxtaposition with Booth's reentry into the outside world after six years in prison. The only other time I've seen actor David Morse was in Penn's 1992 film, The Indian Runner. His Booth is finely shaded with layers of sadness. He mourns the girl he killed, the life he had, the possibilities that have gone by the wayside. Unlike Freddy, he wants to jump-start his life. The tragedy has taught him something. "Freedom is overrated," he tells his friends, trying to communicate the experience of prison. "If freedom isn't about something bigger than freedom, freedom is just ... entertainment."

Morse has some beautifully understated moments. When Freddy first appears in Booth's trailer with his gun, Morse stares at him from his cot and points--at what, the viewer wonders? After a heart-stoppingly tense moment, he asks, "Can I have a cigarette?" Morse looks like a man who has just seen a ghost he's been expecting for six years.

Later, he tells a new girlfriend, JoJo (Robin Wright), how he got a scar over his eye from bashing his head against his cell bars. Moments later, he makes an involuntary gesture toward a wall with his head, catching himself just in time. It's an actor's brush stroke, subtle as a classic Japanese panting.

The Crossing Guard tries to resolve its conflict much too neatly. There are too many jangling nerve endings to be wrapped up by the high operatic ending. Still, the film earns the right to ask us to cut it some slack. At its best, The Crossing Guard has the visceral emotional appeal of John Cassavetes' semi-improvised psychodramas, but with the satisfaction that can only come with finely drawn characters. Penn has restored us to a world where people pick up guns for real reasons, and where movie viewers flinch when they're pointed.

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The Crossing Guard (R; 117 min.), directed and written by Sean Penn, photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond and starring Jack Nicholson and Angelica Huston.


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