I saw Stone
nearly two weeks ago in my favorite screening room in the
city, surrounded by a group of reviewers and their guests
who seemed to deeply appreciate this strange, emotional
clusterfuck by John Curran. I sat fairly riveted to the
screen for the entire running time of the film, but as the
lights came up and my peers openly lauded the film’s merits,
I found myself unable to fully grasp what I’d just seen. And
now, two weeks later as I sit here writing this review, I’m
still at a loss for words to describe the film. But, I
think, that’s a good thing.
Review - Stone
John Curran
(the man behind his other Edward Norton collaboration The
Painted Veil) has made a beast of a film here. A film
that starts with a man (a man who will become Robert De Niro)
nearly throwing his daughter out the window in the hopes of
keeping his wife at home. A film that rockets thirty years
in to the future and finds this same man a parole officer at
a southern penitentiary involved in a strange tryst between
an inmate (Edward Norton, wading from the murk with truly
involved portrayal) and his hyper-sexed fiance (Milla
Jovovich, also nailing a deeply layered performance). The
film follows the mind-games these three play with each
other, each playing one against the other in the hopes of
gaining, well, something. Curran gives no leeway in easy
answers in this film. His characters blossom slowly over the
course of the film, the secrets of their past and their
souls slowly unfolding in front of us, their wants and needs
and desires pushing in at the edges.
If anything, the performances in the film are spectacular.
De Niro especially (finally dropping his attempts at being
funny) plays Jack as a man consumed by some sort of inner
anger, a rigid code of morals that has strangled the
emotions out of him. When he engages in a relationship with
the cunning Lucetta (Milla Jovovich), these emotions, subtly
and impressively, rage to the surface. De Niro anchors the
film, his emotional resonance creating the mirror in which
the film’s other characters reflect, and it is an
outstanding performance, the kind that a De Niro of
yesteryear would surely have lauded.
The deep rot at the center of each of these characters is
highlighted by the films score and cinematography. The
score, a sort of static hiss of religious tracts and pulsing
bass is splayed across breath-taking imagery of the south,
and it creates an idea that this world is rotting from
within just like these characters are. And as they dance and
fuck and burn their lives to the ground, this Southern
landscape just keeps on living.
To say the least, there’s much to be said about Stone
as a reviewer that in itself makes it a winner. I can say I
enjoyed watching the film and that its finely tuned as any
out there right now, but can I say I understood it entirely?
That I really got what Curran was aiming at? No, but
perhaps, that’s what Curran is looking for, for us to dig
deeper to find the meaning.
Noah Sanders is the blog/news editor at Light In The
Attic and a contributor at Sound On The Sound and
the KEXP blog. He also has his own
Criterion-based film site, Criterion Quest.
If you'd like to contact Noah in regards to his
writings here at Side One: Track One then please do
so
here.
- Noah Sanders
-
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