Chasing Giants
It’s one thing to make a terrible adaptation of a novella if you’re the first to do it. Clinty Bentley’s Train Dreams gets a pass from a lot of people who haven’t read Denis Johnson’s book and don’t realize how perverse it is to eschew the novella’s violent passivity for sentimentality. Something like The Postman Always Rings Twice is trickier, because if people aren’t familiar with James M. Cain’s debut specifically, they certainly are with either the Tay Garnet or Bob Rafelson’s takes, if not something looser with the text like Visconti’s Ossessione. Few would compare those films to György Fehér’s adaptation Szenvedély (co-written by Béla Tarr, for whom Fehér produced Sátántangó), only because few have seen it outside the festival circuit in 1998. Fehér’s previous masterpiece Szürkület, though, has been rescued from the depths of obscurity by a restoration that was released by Second Run and Arbelos in 2023 and ‘24, respectively.
Szürkület isn’t a conventional adaptation: it’s based on the 1958 West German film It Happened in Broad Daylight, which was later turned into a more tightly crafted novella by the film’s screenwriter, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, which was released the same year and called The Pledge: Requiem for the Detective Novel. Fehér is at once drawing from post-war crime films while transposing something more tonally in-line with the coldness of Dürrenmatt’s prose, creating a visual style similar to Tarr’s haunting and textured black-and-white. Szürkület follows a disillusioned detective as he searches for a brutal murderer of young girls. The case seems closed when the town finds a man they all believe is guilty, and who kills himself before the truth can be definitively found. The detective, though, can’t shake what he’s heard about the murdered girl being friends with a “giant,” who allegedly gave her hedgehogs. It’s a strange fairytale image, the more grim medieval kind that isn’t found much in the age of modernity.
Luckily for Sean Penn, few had seen Szürkület when he released The Pledge in 2001. Starring Jack Nicholson in the detective role, The Pledge is a technically faithful adaptation of Dürrenmatt’s novella, moving the story from a small town in Switzerland to Reno and Tahoe. To his credit, Penn does have one interesting idea bookending the film which, faithful to Dürrenmatt’s text, subverts the resoluteness of crime fiction; if the film’s remembered for anything, it’s these sequences alone. In between those bookends, Penn crafts an unbelievably bland procedural that at times stands out for how unwilling he is to lean into how bizarre the film is. Again, it’s a police story where a detective starts to chase a giant.
Penn populates his film with his rolodex, filling out his cast with greats like Helen Mirren, Harry Dean Stanton, Vanessa Redgrave, Mickey Rourke, and Sam Shepard, only to have them appear for a scene or two (lucky ones like Tom Noonan and Benecio del Toro get to even be important to the plot, even though Penn horribly typecasts them). Some might look at the cast list and think The Pledge is an interesting curio, others (like myself) will find it a frustratingly hollow way to distract from the simple fact that Penn has no idea how to direct a movie. Beyond his sequences of desolate poetry at either end of The Pledge’s runtime (which itself is a half-hearted nod to the lost Nicholson of the actor’s youth—but if one wants to see him questioned, you should probably stick to Antonioni’s The Passenger), Penn sleepwalks through every other sequence of the film until he remembers that he has an idea for a cut here, or a single image there. It’s one of the worst kinds of hack filmmaking, where the director forgets that they’re supposed to be in the chair the whole time.