De Niro and Norton Face Off in Stone

Ron Batzdorff

De Niro and Norton: Guess which one is named "Stone"?

Details

Stone
Directed by John Curran
Overture Films
Opens October 8

ALSO:
Feature: Ed Norton's Double Life

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More About

• Robert De Niro
• Stone (Movie)
• Edward Norton
• Movie Stars
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

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Robert De Niro’s alarm must have finally gone off—in Stone, the actor seems more awake than he has been in years. De Niro is Jack, a prison corrections officer who, abandoning all professional and common sense, foolishly screws himself by screwing Lucetta (Milla Jovovich), the wife of the corn-rowed arsonist inmate Stone (Edward Norton), whose parole case he must soon rule upon. Jack’s failing is nominally one of the flesh, yet it’s spiritual and moral deep-rot that truly plagues him, with AM-dial Christian radio blather providing an incessant backdrop for both Jack and Stone’s dual quests for deliverance. Director John Curran’s sure hand is most evident in pre-credit intro passages that create unnerving dissonance from jumps between locations, time periods, and incidents, as well as in an atonal soundscape of undulating chimes, drones, and overly symbolic bee buzzes. However, despite a restrained, internalized performance by De Niro that refuses to turn Jack into an aged version of Cape Fear’s Max Cady, as well as Norton taking a hoary, rough-neck caricature and infusing him with unexpected blissed-out tranquility, the B-movie-tawdry and unpersuasive plotting undercuts the material’s sober concerns about sin and salvation. At odds with its own lofty and base instincts, Stone ultimately channels neither compellingly.