A ‘Pledge’ to Detail

Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski, husband and wife writers of the Sean Penn-directed “The Pledge,” are purists.

It is clear in the deliberate details of this thriller, for example, when the retiring cop, played with restraint by Jack Nicholson, tells forensics investigators to check the tiny buttons of a dead child’s dress for prints; or later in a barn filled with noisy turkeys when he tells a mother that her 8-year-old daughter has been found dead in the snow.

The Kromolowskis’ script adapts a 1958 German novel by Swiss author Friedrich Durrenmatt, whose humor--not well known in the U.S.--runs toward the dark. “In Europe, Durrenmatt was a major literary power. As a director [in Denmark] I knew his plays well,” says Jerzy.

The writers are not the only couple connected with “The Pledge.” Penn cast his wife, Robin Wright Penn, as the waitress Lori. The character and her young daughter, played by Pauline Roberts, are drawn unknowingly into a relationship with Nicholson’s obsessed, gradually unraveling ex-cop--a fisherman by hobby--who in spite of caring for mother and child uses the daughter as bait to reel in a serial killer.

As for the writing couple, they met in Denmark, where Wisconsin native Mary had gone to study. Jerzy had emigrated from Poland when anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic politics in the early ‘70s resulted in his citizenship being revoked. In Denmark, he earned degrees in film at the Holbaek School of Art and the University of Copenhagen, and made a name as a still photographer and director. As a symphony musician, Mary met Jerzy when scoring his Danish film “The Verdict.” She earned one master’s degree in Scandinavian literature from the University of Copenhagen, another in comparative literature from UCLA.

The couple moved to the U.S. in the late ‘70s. Based on his education and experience in Denmark, Jerzy was accepted at the American Film Institute as a fellow in directing, and they settled in Westwood, where they still live with son Daniel, 14, and a poker-faced Rottweiler named Beckett.

The Kromolowskis discuss their work with some hesitance.

“The screenplay is just a blueprint; ultimately, a film is and should be a director’s medium. The director adds texture, details that imprint a film. Lucky for us, Sean has terrific judgment and a very unique eye,” says Jerzy. “Sean added this great edge. Where we prolonged certain tensions, he went to the heart of the drama directly, and enriched what we wrote,” adds Mary.

Reviews of the film have been mixed, but one consistent observation is that the film is intelligent.

Penn’s partner and co-producer on “The Pledge,” Michael Fitzgerald, was familiar with the Kromolowskis’ work on some other projects. “When he brought us the [Durrenmatt] book,” Mary explained, “we found a way to Americanize the story, to reset the moral dilemma, the constricted feeling of a tight, rural community in Minnesota. Eventually, the story was located in Reno.”

As parents, the couple wanted to avoid gratuitous violence, opting to depict the consequences of a gruesome crime rather than its gory details. The writers interviewed detectives dealing in child crime, as well as doctors--Mary’s sister is an East Coast pediatrician who has testified in such cases. “Crimes to children were a big, unspoken problem in Durrenmatt’s Europe and are a problem right here today. We wanted to show this in an integrated and respectful way,” says Mary.

The Kromolowskis have written a heady hybrid: material with a distinctly eccentric, non-studio feel, complex enough to interest perfectionists like Nicholson and Penn, with just enough grit to satisfy the elevated shock threshold of moviegoers today. Although distributed by Warner Bros., there’s a cerebrally independent feel to the film, which includes performances by Sam Shepard, Vanessa Redgrave, Helen Mirren and Benicio Del Toro.

True to Durrenmatt, the cop trades integrity and the hope of love to get the bad guy and begins the film as he ends it, crazed and undone, like Hamlet, by right motives and wrong means. This can be problematic for American audiences; there is no easy closure here, no tidy ending. Heroes are ambiguous, redemption subjective, and there are no winners--except perhaps for the screenwriters and Penn, who made the film exactly as they wanted.