TRAGEDY IN TWO GENDERS : 'The House of Mirth' & 'The Pledge'.

Part way through Terence Davies's lavish, bitter The House of Mirth comes a fabulous movie kiss. Edith Wharton's icy 1905 manners-and-morals satire of New York's moneyed aristocracy pairs Lily Bart, a society girl dependent on her rich aunt, with Lawrence Selden, a charming but impecunious gentleman lawyer. Desire crackles between the two, but, alas, both need to marry well; they're the handsome social assets waiting to be fetched up by rich partners, and when they slip away from a party to trade cigarettes and reckless endearments, their kiss is all the more passionate for defying the iron laws of marital economy. Critics have noted the similarity of Wharton's money-obsessed era to our own. But today's trophy wives are less Lily Bart than Playmate types, today's merger marriages less tragic than comic: a raucous free-for-all where everyone grabs what can be had, then calls in the lawyers. Wharton's vision was bleaker by far, since the rigid code of female reputation was absolute, and a woman who lost hers, as Lily ultimately does, faced an irreversible drop in her stock. As Lily veers toward oblivion--cast out of society, forced ultimately to do piecework in a milliner's sweatshop--The House of Mirth becomes a lurid nightmare of poverty, with downward mobility a fate worse than death.

Davies's adaptation captures both the formality of Wharton's language and settings and her novel's relentless fatalism. The House of Mirth turns American belle epoque opulence (the film was actually shot at several Victorian mansions in Scotland) into images of imprisonment and humiliation: Lily in fur-collared dresses festooned with brooches; Lily fitted out in veils and parasols like a doll, copiously decorated and framed--framed literally at one point, posing in a grotesque living tableau of a John Singer Sargent portrait. As the suffering heroine, Gillian Anderson--Agent Scully to millions of "X-Files" fans--provides a lesson in how quickly a good actress can free herself from her TV persona, deftly playing the range of Lily's emotions, from coy teasing and a panting, flushed arousal (that kiss!) to histrionic outrage, and finally a zombie-like submissiveness as she sleepwalks toward her demise.

Wharton's furious attack on the values of the market was launched from deep within the master class, and a century later the tragic plight of the upper-class woman may be lost to audiences that can't but wonder how much harder Lily's working-class sister milliners have it. The quiet formality of Davies's film may also prove a reach for some--accustomed, as we are, to conflating anger with shouting and violence with punching. But there's no missing Wharton's wrath at the dependent status of women, with honor as their only currency--a currency ever vulnerable to the manipulations of men. Though written in the twentieth century, The House of Mirth shows a nineteenth-century novelist's belief in fixed laws of nature and society, with human behavior suspended, as Balzac wrote, between two motives, l'amour and l'ambition. Wharton's bleak vision discloses the latter remorselessly crushing the former; and a rising note of Victorian melodrama betrays the fury lurking beneath her decorous and opulent surfaces.

Sean Penn's The Pledge lets us know life's no picnic for men, either. The threat here is not too much society, but too little--the snowbound reaches of the American West a blank canvas on which Penn scratches out a scrawl of male isolation. Jack Nicholson plays Jerry Black, a famed Reno detective being ushered into retirement by younger colleagues semisecretly relieved to see the old fart go. But not so fast. In the middle of Jerry's retirement party, news comes of a girl's brutally violated body discovered in woods outside town. Jerry insists on joining the investigation--he hasn't retired yet, he reminds his captain--and a few hours later, breaking the horrific news to the girl's parents, he promises he'll find the killer. At first it seems that won't take much. A suspect is quickly apprehended, a mentally impaired Indian (Benicio Del Toro) with a criminal record. Jerry watches a macho younger detective (Aaron Eckhardt, fast becoming a specialist in pathologic maleness) extort a dubious confession--after which the suspect wrests a gun from an officer and kills himself. Case closed. But Jerry is not convinced. Cancel that fishing trip.

With a setup this familiar, we're always a step ahead: the little girl who tells Jerry, ominously, that her dead playmate had befriended "a wizard" with a big black car; the revelation of similar, unsolved crimes the Indian couldn't have committed; the colleagues annoyed at Jerry's refusal to disappear ("You want me to open the case because you've got a hunch?"). But Penn takes this stale material and makes it fresh, largely by paying less attention to his plot than to Jerry's obsession with the case. We see Jerry returning months later to the crime scene, now a lovely green meadow, not knowing why he's there, except that he made a promise. He's haunted, we understand, by mistakes made in the past, and by the grim darkness of aging and obsolescence ahead. A relationship develops with Lori (Robin Wright Penn), a hard-bitten barmaid and single mom out in the boondocks where Jerry, following a hunch about the true murderer's modus operandi, buys a run-down gas station and settles in. When Lori shows up one night, battered by her ex-husband, Jerry takes her and her daughter in to stay with him--no conditions, he insists. Again, we see their intimacy coming all the way, yet it's deeply moving nonetheless. So lonely is director Penn's view of life, so bereft of solace, that when people find one another it's with a rush of embarrassed gratitude. We're surprised, and moved as well, because they are.

For a thriller, The Pledge is unusually low-key. Slow-motion shots--a pink balloon floating away, a girl in a red dress on a swing--boost the sense of dreamlike obsession and suspense, and Chris Menges's camera writes visual tone poems of isolation: an empty country bridge, wisps of fog in a valley, the endless fields of snow. These images of rural loneliness reveal Penn's brand of brooding, harsh romanticism, a romanticism stripped of the sublime--fixed on nature's capacity not to exhilarate but to annihilate, either swiftly, by killing, or slowly, by decrepitude and despair.

I've wondered about Jack Nicholson's ability to play roles without a leering, campy edge of the insane. But The Pledge nicely dampens this tendency to exaggeration, and Nicholson's drowsy, heavy-lidded expression delivers quiet interior moments of a kind rare in his performances--as when, glancing out the window as he packs up his office, he watches an old person using a walker in the street below. Vanessa Redgrave, as the murdered girl's grieving grandmother, and Mickey Rourke, as a janitor undone by the disappearance of his young daughter, serve up wrenching cameo portrayals of grief. And with not only Nicholson and Rourke on hand, but Sam Shepard and Harry Dean Stanton as well, Penn gives free rein to his fascination with fallen men--sinners whose lonely, despairing toughness lies one step short of madness. His vision of maleness has been compared to a train wreck, but to me it seems more desert island (has any film this male directed ever had women in the audience weeping?). Two-thirds of the way through, I thought Penn might let the plot slip away altogether--forget the serial-killer drama, and leave Jerry and Lori stunned by happiness in their new life. But no. So determined is Penn to have everything whirl away into the vortex of male obsession that he rams through a grim and ironic turn of events, and it's all attitude--a strutting nihilism that comes off as far cheaper than the movie itself.

The Pledge is that rare thing, a Hollywood movie that deserved a happier ending. And while nothing could seem farther from the intrigues of late Gilded Age Fifth Avenue than a murder thriller in remote Nevada, Sean Penn and Edith Wharton actually have a lot in common. Both take their heroes and hurl them into an abyss, riding an implacable determinism to a dark place where sympathy and rage become one.