January 19, 2001 | According to the late, great Howard Hawks, a good movie can be defined by these essentials: "Three great scenes. No bad scenes." To that, I would add that a good moviemaker is someone who can take a scene you've seen dozens of times before, and present it in a way that makes it feel newly minted and freshly compelling.

Sean Penn works that rare magic time and again during The Pledge, his third and best effort as a feature film director. Much as he did in The Indian Runner (1991) and The Crossing Guard (1995), he sustains a mesmerizing intensity while relentlessly building toward an emotionally wrenching climax. Better still, he does more by having his cast do a bit less.

Like many other great actors who have flexed their creative muscles on the other side of the camera, Penn likes to give his players all the time and space they need to convey the complexities of their characters. As a result, the first two movies he directed were filled with show-stopping performances that, all too often, really did stop the show.

In The Pledge, however, Penn is working within the format of a police procedural, forcing himself to pay greater attention to such niceties as plot and pacing. Not that the acting suffers: Jack Nicholson, who gave one of his best performances of recent years in Crossing Guard, is even better here. And he's backed by an exceptionally strong ensemble that includes Helen Mirren, Vanessa Redgrave and Mickey Rourke. Each of these notables appears in a one-scene cameo, so they must make every moment count. (Sam Shepard and Aaron Eckhart, among others, drop by for slightly bigger roles.) Even so, none of the supporting players is allowed to be so show-offy as to impede or undercut the narrative.

For better or worse, Penn wrote his first two movies. In The Pledge, however, he works from a screenplay by the husband-and-wife team of Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski, who adapted and Americanized a novel by Swiss author Friedrich Durrenmatt. Nicholson gives a powerfully implosive performance as Jerry Black, a Nevada homicide detective who's approaching the end of his career. In fact, Jerry is at his retirement party when he hears about the discovery of a brutally murdered little girl in the snow-covered countryside. Partly out of a sense of duty - and, yes, partly as an excuse to leave the party early - Jerry drives to the crime scene, where he reluctantly assumes a responsibility that no one else wants: He agrees to break the bad news to the little girl's parents.

Early on, Penn subtly establishes a sense of mounting dread. The crime scene investigation is at once conventionally familiar and unsettlingly odd: It's just after dark, a light snow is falling, and the detectives and uniformed officers go about their grim business with flashlights and headlights as their only illumination. When Jerry visits the parents, he approaches them as they tend to what look like thousands of turkey chicks in a vast barn. We see them from a distance, and we don't hear what Jerry tells them. But we see what his words do to them, and that's enough.

Inside the farmhouse, the father demands to know why Jerry doesn't want the parents to view their daughter's body. "Because we hardly dared to look ourselves," the detective replies. The mother insists that Jerry swear to God that he will find the "devil" who murdered Ginny, her daughter. Jerry swears, and his fate is sealed.

Jerry's colleagues are ready to close the case when they arrest a likely suspect (Benicio Del Toro, the hardest working man in showbiz today) who conveniently confesses, then even more conveniently commits suicide. Still, Jerry has his doubts. And those doubts calcify into certainties when he discovers that, in a nearby town, a little girl who looked a lot like Ginny was murdered years ago in a similar fashion. Worse, another Ginny lookalike in another nearby town vanished without a trace. Jerry thinks he has uncovered evidence of a serial killer. His colleagues think it's time for Jerry to start enjoying his retirement.

Slowly, methodically, The Pledge charts the progression of Jerry's obsession. Seemingly on impulse, he purchases a gas station near a fishing camp. It's in the general area where the serial killer may be lurking. And while it's a long shot that Jerry will ever cross his path, never mind: The ex-cop is willing to bide his time and remain ready to pounce. In the meantime, Jerry tentatively opens his heart, and his home, to Lori (Robin Wright Penn), a battered wife and single mother. She's a desperately needy woman, and she finds comfort in Jerry's company. Trouble is, her daughter is... well, a lovely little girl who might attract the killer Jerry has been looking for. Provided, of course, that the killer isn't a figment of his guilt-racked, paranoia-fueled imagination.

Penn turns the conventions of police procedurals inside out, focusing intently on the intimate details of lives indirectly but indelibly affected by unspeakable acts. In the end, The Pledge plays fair: The truth is revealed, the mystery is solved. And yet the tragedy is inescapable.