Christianity Today Movies and TV<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nDirector John Curran made two perhaps inadvertently telling comments to the Toronto Film Festival audience following the festival screening of Stone<\/em>. He said that when Edward Norton originally read the script, he passed on playing the title character with the comment that he \u201cjust didn\u2019t see it.\u201d Later, after Robert DeNiro agreed to play the title role, Norton reconsidered. Also, Curran mentioned that the film\u2019s near constant use of Christian talk-back radio as part of the soundtrack was a late addition because the director felt that DeNiro is a very closed actor who didn\u2019t reveal much about his character\u2019s internal mental or emotional landscape and Curran couldn\u2019t find music that would cue the audience into what Jack (DeNiro\u2019s character) was thinking and feeling.<\/p>\nI bring up these two comments not necessarily because the line between subtle and muddled is a particularly thin one but rather because I suspect a lot of the film\u2019s defenders will accuse me of being on the wrong side of it. C.S. Lewis once opined\u2014I believe it was in response to the tired question about whether God could make a rock so big that He couldn\u2019t move it\u2014that rhetorical nonsense doesn\u2019t become sense just by inserting the word \u201cGod\u201d into a sentence. The Stone<\/em> corollary might be that asking questions that are in their essence religious in nature doesn\u2019t necessarily transform something muddled into something insightful. Sometimes it just results in muddled ideas about religious or spiritual subjects.<\/p>\nDeNiro plays Jack Mabry, a parole instructor on the verge of retirement who once responded to his wife saying she wanted to leave him by threatening to kill their child if she ever tried to do so\u2014or even mentioned it again. Norton is Gerald \u201cStone\u201d Creeson, one of the last inmates for whom Jack will have to write a report recommending for or against parole. Perhaps sensing a core of sexual frustration or perhaps just fishing for some sort of blackmail leverage, Stone encourages his wife to contact Jack outside of the prison and see if there\u2019s anything she might do to help Stone\u2019s chances at parole. While Jack is dealing with his own temptations and failings, Stone begins reading and parroting information about an alternative religion that claims focusing on small sounds is the first step towards becoming God\u2019s tuning forks. (Curran made it a point in the discussion to emphasize that the book Stone reads and the religious practices he adopts were entirely made up for the film.)<\/p>\n
DeNiro\u2019s acting credentials are unimpeachable, but the film seems to rely more on his persona\u2014the personality an actor brings to a film based on his association with other roles\u2014than on his performance. None of the actors are bad, really, and Jovovich does probably her best work ever, but they don\u2019t seem to be in synch with each other or the script. You can have three great musicians, but if each of them and their conductor has a different piece of music the result isn\u2019t generally harmonious. It is one thing to keep the audience in suspense because we don\u2019t know which way a conflicted character is going to go; it is quite another thing to keep the audience in suspense by giving it conflicting sketches of who the characters are. Lucetta is a bit of a cipher\u2014she has to cycle through multiple personalities to find what will push Jack\u2019s buttons and so we get a sense of the game she is playing but no real sense of the woman who is playing it. Jack\u2019s wife will chastise him in one scene for using the lord\u2019s name in vain and then spout new age babble about how we are all descended from rocks in the next. Jack himself is supposed to be a smoldering cauldron of anger capable of anything but his demeanor is more sullen and defeated than lively or feisty.<\/p>\n
The fact that Jack\u2019s two most overt acts of anger are both directed at women tends to make him come across as little more than a garden variety bully. To the extent the film works at all on a thematic level it is to the extent that it successfully manipulates the audience into complicity with Jack\u2019s hypocrisy by inviting us, with our own imperfections, not just to recognize another\u2019s flaws but to long for their punishment. Had the film ever invited or even allowed us to identify with anyone in it long enough to consider the danger inherent in judging another too legalistically, I might have admired it more. Instead, Stone seems to care more about keeping us guessing about what the characters are going to do than it does about making us care what is going to happen to them if and when they do it.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Director John Curran made two perhaps inadvertently telling comments to the Toronto Film Festival audience following the festival screening of Stone. He said that when Edward Norton originally read the script, he passed on playing the title character with the comment that he \u201cjust didn\u2019t see it.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1555,"featured_media":12549,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[95,16],"tags":[479,480,481],"class_list":["post-2575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-elsewhere","category-reviews","tag-edward-norton","tag-john-curran","tag-robert-deniro"],"yoast_head":"\n
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