REVIEW: Fine Performances Can't Bring Stone to Life

I left Stone, a dreary pseudo-noir starring Robert De Niro as a parole officer and Ed Norton as an inmate angling for release, wondering both what happened -- I know it involved recession-era Detroit, inchoate religious overtones, and Milla Jovovich's nipples -- and what happened. Why did this film, built on a solid generic foundation with some of the finest materials in the business, fail to come together?

In the immediate aftermath I conducted a forensic examination of the press notes, which begin with a description of the film's producers, Jordan Schur and David Mimran, and the formation of their company in 2009. Exhibit A: "Schur and Mimran selected director and writer John Curran to helm their debut film." Ladies and gentlemen, does something about that sentence seem off to you? Obviously producers scout scripts and hire directors to make them all the time, but something about "their debut film" captured a big part of the problem: Stone feels like the product of a committee, not a collaboration, and the resulting aesthetic and thematic incoherence undermines what could have been a precise and even profound character piece. Because the film is overproduced and unconvincing in telegraphing its several gestural themes, its excellent lead performances get lost in what feels like an aesthetic tug of war over what a movie should be, and do.

That might be what happens when you think of the script (by Junebug writer Angus Maclachlan) as "a jumping off point," as Norton suggests they did. Curran (The Painted Veil) opens the film in high, humming style, with a terrifying scene of domestic anomie: A woman reaches a breaking point with her catatonic, golf-watching, scotch-sipping husband; the husband retaliates by threatening to throw their child out the window if she leaves. A buzzing wasp is a casualty of the confrontation. I don't know what a wasp dying in the first act portends, but in the second scene we jump forward about 30 years, and Jack (De Niro) hands over his gun as he heads into the prison where he works. Jack is about to retire, but wants to see his remaining cases through; one is that of Gerald "Stone" Creeson (Norton), who has spent nearly a decade in prison for being an accomplice to the murder of his grandparents.

Curran's no tease; he puts the film's big ticket -- the face-offs between the two men in Jack's office -- front and center. If anything they're too front and center: The camera frames each of them head on, with plenty of elbow room on either side, and cuts across an 180-degree axis when either of them speak; eventually they begin delivering their lines straight to camera. Norton (wearing goofy cornrows and speaking in a laconic, Drano-gurgling voice) and De Niro (defeated and gray yet magnetically remote) are in fine form, but the direction won't let them build the dynamic the film is supposed to hinge upon. Instead what you take away from their scenes, in which Stone's pleas for clemency set up the moral framework that the characters will be organized within (How long can you judge a person for one misdeed? What is the nature of forgiveness and spiritual rehabilitation?) is the film's excitement with itself.

Is Stone really sorry? Does Jack really care? By the second time the duo go through those paces, the film feels stuck. Then in struts Stone's wife Lucetta (Jovovich), the moral wild card (or "alien," as Stone calls her) who accepts Stone's plan for her to seduce Jack like it's a no-brainer. Frances Conroy plays Jack's wife, Madylyn, as the inevitably pickled housewife; with nothing to say to each other over lunch they persist in sterile Bible readings, a study in marital desiccation that is soon contrasted by Jack's psychedelic boning sessions with the godless Lucetta. That's one way to beat the retirement blues.

The initial seduction makes about as much sense as anything else; we never get a sense of Jack as a man, or even a tenable character, so his choices become moot. Curran cross-cuts the scene with that of Stone watching in epiphanic rapture as a prisoner is slaughtered, as if to slake the sacrificial thirst of the inmates. Suddenly he's saved, a process that began when he half-heartedly picked up a Scientology-esque pamphlet that urges seekers to try and tune into a cosmic wavelength that sounds sort of like a dial tone. It's kind of fun to watch Norton playing a character whose peanut intellect is suddenly trying to grasp its spirituality. His Stone feels like the most fully formed character, even as his aims remain elusive.

In lieu of an agreed-upon higher power, the four characters must reckon with each other; thanks to that lack of a greater vision, I found it difficult to invest those reckonings with much meaning. An impressionistic use of sound -- much of it taking its cue from that seminal, droning wasp, a lot of it comprising layered snippets of right-wing radio -- is one of Stone's most consistent motifs. Plenty of artificial vibrations are deployed in the attempt to create a feeling, or even a world; unfortunately, and unlike its namesake, Stone can't quite achieve a genuine, redeeming vibe of its own.