Mary has gotten on with her life. Freddy hasn't. He's trapped in a world of nightly drunken revels in a strip joint, punctuated by brief physical respite with a naive young hooker. He despises himself, and thinks that revenge will be healing.
The other key character is John (David Morse), who has served his time and returns home to live in a trailer parked in the driveway of his parents' home. He is still filled with guilt over taking the little girl's life, and when he awakens one night to find Freddy standing there with a gun, he does nothing to defend himself.
But the gun doesn't function, and (in a development that reads suspiciously like a writer's device) Freddy gives him three days to live.
During those three days, both men turn desperately to women for help and comfort. John meets an artist named JoJo (Robin Wright), who could love him but finally tells him, "Your guilt is too much competition for me. You should let me know when you want life." And Freddy arranges a midnight rendezvous in a diner with Mary, where they talk over their life together in a way that has an eerie resonance if you reflect that Nicholson and Huston lived together for years.
Both women are able to help. Neither man can accept help.
They can help only one another, and the film's climax comes after Freddy, on the way to kill John, is stopped by the police for - yes, drunken driving. The ending will strike many people as contrived and stagy, as indeed it is, but perhaps it is closer to life than a neater, more cinematic ending.
"The Crossing Guard" was written and directed by Sean Penn, who with this film and "Indian Runner" (1991) shows himself to be a genuine director. What is good about this film is very good, but there are too many side trips, in both the plot and the emotions, for the film to draw us in fully. In a curious way - I know this will sound strange - it might have worked better with an aactor other than Nicholson.
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