The 10-minute opening prologue of Stone instantly affirms that whoever made it knows how to make movies. Sometime in the 70s or 80s, a young couple sit in a small house. The man – whose distinctive mole on his cheek tells us that he’ll someday grow up to become Robert De Niro – watches TV, silent, inaccessible. The woman watches him, edgy, frustrated. A fly buzzes on the window-sill. Suddenly the woman’s had enough; she decides to leave him. “You keep my soul in a dungeon,” she tells him. Wordlessly, the man rushes upstairs, where their baby daughter is sleeping – and dangles the child out the window. Leave, and I’ll drop her, he says with chilling conviction. His wife submits. The window sash closes on the fly, squashing it dead. Outside, a field of grass ripples in the breeze.
Nothing else in the film is as perfectly-judged as that prologue – though mention of a soul recurs later, quite a few times. The most significant may be when the talk turns to reincarnation and we’re told the soul begins its journey as a stone (before graduating to animals, plants, etc) – which in turn links up with Stone, played by Edward Norton, a convict who finds religion, or at least spirituality. It’s as though his name confirms his status as a lowly soul with much to learn – though in fact he’s more admirable than Jack (De Niro), the parole officer we already glimpsed as a young man in that opening prologue, whose job is to decide whether prisoners are ready for release to the outside world. Every day, inmates insist that they’ve changed. Needless to say, Jack himself hasn’t.
Stone is the story of these two people, plus Stone’s slutty wife Lucetta (Milla Jovovich) – Jack’s wife Madylyn (Frances Conroy) is a sad woman on the fringes of the action – though ‘story’ may be overstating it. There’s a plot of sorts, with Lucetta trying to engineer her husband’s release by seducing Jack, but the film is mostly static. Madylyn drinks and plays cards. Lucetta thinks about having sex, and occasionally does. Jack slouches wearily down prison corridors, stares into the distance and listens to preachers on the radio – and if we say this is De Niro’s best performance in almost a decade (which it is), that’s mostly because it channels how fed-up and jaded he often seems about his work in real life; Jack is totally cynical, convinced that “No-one changes for the better”. And meanwhile Stone is proving him wrong, getting hooked on a New Age religion and musing on spiritual questions: “Have you ever thought about things that go on forever?…”
The film is serious about Stone’s epiphany (which he has while witnessing the murder of a prison guard), just as it’s serious about Jack’s crushing, nameless burden of guilt. Stone will leave most punters twitching impatiently and wondering what’s happened to their beloved multiplex – though it falls between two stools, unlikely to please the arthouse contingent either (“Europeans do it better!” yelled a fellow critic at the screening I attended) – but it’s also brave and unusual, the kind of film everyone wishes Hollywood would make more often.
The problem, for me, is that half of it is serious while the other half deals in shopworn clichés. The prologue is excellent, and the first few scenes of Jack looking lifeless and exhausted fit perfectly – but then Stone appears, with his jive talk and his hair in cornrows, and credibility takes an instant nosedive. Maybe it needed a younger actor, or someone other than Norton (who’s better at playing weaklings than badass types), but the pungent dialogue feels theatrical and the interaction – gruff De Niro trying to interrupt the flow of verbiage: “Stone … Stone … STONE!” – feels generic. Lucetta, too, is generic, a callous femme fatale (though Jovovich, with her odd reptilian presence, hits some unexpected notes). One couple seems derived from straight-to-video action thrillers, the other from an Edward Albee play. Add a slow pace and lashings of portentous God-talk, and the whole thing’s just a mess.
Still, it’s a good mess – a well-meaning mess, and a mess that might even galvanise Robert De Niro to start acting again (assuming he survives the imminent Little Fockers). Jack plays God – his job involves passing judgment on others – without having answered for his own sins, and perhaps he never will because he’s stuck in a narrow view of religion, typified in the radio preacher’s desolate sermons (“We sin because we are sinners,” says the preacher, adding that even the most righteous man deserves to go to Hell). Will Jack break free? We’re not sure, because the ending is as open as Tony Soprano’s – and almost as exhilarating. Stone starts and finishes superbly. It’s the bits in between that let it down.
