The Crossing Guard (1995)***

Seen on 6-8-2009 - St.Movies
Cast: Jack Nicholson (Freddy Gale), David Morse (John Booth),Angelic Huston (Mary)
Dir/Scr.Play: Sean Penn
Freddy Gale has sworn to kill the man, John Booth, who ran over his daughter in a case of drunken driving and is sent to jail. The film takes up action when Booth has come out of prison and Freddy is determined to kill him. The opening scenes show Freddy confronting Booth in his trailer with a gun that fails to work, while Booth himself is surprisingly ready to be shot. Booth even persuades him to kill him and says he doesn't seek forgiveness for what has happened. But Freddy leaves giving him 3 days in which he will come back to kill him. The rest of the action reveals the harrowing effects of guilt in John Booth on the one hand, and on the other the state of Freddy's mind. Freddy's problem is he is deeply affected by the death of his child, but at the same time aware that John Booth doesn't deserve to be killed for it especially when the latter has done his time and is still very remorseful about it.
In a crucial scene he phones his divorced wife in the middle of the night to tell her, while choking with suppressed grief, about a dream in which he saw school children crossing the street while the John Booth the killer himself is guiding them as the crossing guard. From the way the roles are reversed in this dream, one begins suspect that John Booth, in spite of being cast as an unwitting killer of the girl, is also conceived as Freddy's doppleganger.
In any case Freddy's feelings towards his daughter's killer are not an unmixed affair.
Freddy himself is chased by police for drunken driving. Both men--Freddy Gale and John Booth--can't enjoy their carousals and their encounters with the women they pick up. Yet both turn to women for help, although they cannot accept their help. It seems as if Freddy has no alternative but shoot John Booth, while the latter cannot but be shot. The last scenes show how Booth will not and cannot shoot Freddy when he could have easily done it, nor does he want to be shot because he keeps running away to escape being shot. Similarly, Freddy runs after Booth with a gun pointed at him but seems half-hearted in shooting him. Together they end up near the grave of Freddy's child and they seem to join hands over the grave in a gesture of reconciliation.
The film appears to be confused in its delineation of the psychology of the two protagonists who refuse to get on with life long after the tragic accident of death.
Or, it is possible that the tragedy of these two individuals lay in their confusions.
In the final analysis, I found the film too contrived in its situations.