Ed Norton's Double Life

Movie stars make a living peddling distinct, definable personalities. Edward Norton, a movie star who might have enjoyed the comparative anonymity of a character actor if not for the gossip-media market value of a few of his habits (an aggressive perfectionism that has earned him a “reputation” for “being difficult,” a penchant for dating tabloid-famous women), has built a career on the exploration of dual personalities, and the gray area in between them.

Norton in Primal Fear, above, and American History X.

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

Norton famously landed his breakthrough role in Primal Fear by being the only actor auditioned who could convincingly play two people: shy, naive altar boy Aaron, and Aaron’s violent alter ego, Roy. That bifurcated part set a template for Norton’s career. He plays either clean-shaven, boyish idealists (Keeping the Faith), or hard cases in wifebeaters glowering behind facial hair (American History X)—and even when primarily filling one role, he brings in at least an echo of the other extreme. He’s made a number of films that bring this duality into the primary narrative: Primal Fear, Fight Club, the Coen Brothers–meets–Patty Duke good-brother/bad-brother shtick of the recently released Leaves of Grass. Even The Incredible Hulk—widely considered a failure in the wake of Marvel’s decision to replace Norton with Mark Ruffalo in the upcoming Avengers movie—works insofar as the actor infuses Bruce Banner with the same barely contained darkness that makes him so exciting to watch even in his most passive modes.

This binary dynamic is taken to new ends in John Curran’s Stone, which opens this week. Norton’s title character, a thirtysomething former drug addict heading into the back nine of a sentence for arson, is a charismatic schemer transformed into a different person after an unexpected spiritual conversion. The film twins Norton’s criminal with Robert De Niro’s Jack, a corrections officer on the verge of retirement who has been hiding deep discontent and hostility. In a number of long one-on-one scenes, Norton and De Niro do a conversational dance around issues of spirituality and morality in which, increasingly, the criminal seems to function as the corrections officer’s conscience.

“They almost start to swap states,” Norton says, sitting in a dressing room at Los Angeles's KCET, where he has just taped the Tavis Smiley show. “It’s about one guy who seems extremely unstable becoming more and more stable, and one guy who seems stable becoming more and more unstable. It’s a study of people who are at different points on the curve of moving toward some kind of enlightenment, and it’s mysterious to them.”

Desperate to game the corrections system, Stone conspires with his wife (Milla Jovovich, excellent as an inscrutable nympho-fatale) to put Jack in a compromising position. It seems like a basic film-noir triangle at first, but the filmmakers skirt the expected beats at almost every turn and totally exclude the viewer from psychological exposition: No one in this movie is ever sure of what anyone else is really thinking or feeling, and we’re left to guess along with them.

“If you think it’s oblique now . . . I didn’t really understand for about a year,” Norton admits. “To me, it was impenetrably oblique. I couldn’t get a bead on Stone. [Then] the economy tanked. I know it sounds like a weird thing, but it started resonating for me when [Curran] was saying, ‘I want to make an economic-downturn film.’ You know, that whole notion of lives built on structures of assumed validity—like marriages and church and the constructs that we use to define ourselves—suddenly evaporating and revealing a hollowness at the center that causes collapse. John was going after the moment in a way that was still murky, still elusive.”

The closest Stone gets to directly tying itself to the times comes through its soundtrack, which layers excerpts from conservative talk radio (bombastic hosts bitching about Obamanomics, listeners calling in to discuss “this angst that a lot of people are feeling in this country”) onto the score. The movie’s attempt at subtle contemporary allegory put it squarely in Norton’s wheelhouse. “I’m always kind of turned on if I feel like you’re taking aim at something that’s rooted in the weirdness or the difficulty of the moment,” he says. “I hate to say it, but it’s embedded in [Fight Club], the phrase ‘We all felt it, Tyler just gave it a name’—I mean, that’s what art is at its best, it’s like something that you’ve been feeling but haven’t named yet, like it brings it to ground and gives it a name and everybody goes, ‘Ah.’ ”

Perhaps this striving to use film as a sort of cultural reportage has something to do with why Norton has often been held up as an exemplar of his peer group. Some of this is put on him by others—try to find a magazine profile that doesn’t brand him as “the best actor of his generation,” at least up to the widely maligned Death to Smoochy—but a lot of it he steps into himself. In interviews over the years, Norton has frequently invoked the notion of generational responsibility, whether talking about the fight to save the planet or the fight against Oscar gifting. When Fight Club was released to polarizing response, he complained on the record about critics like The New Yorker’s David Denby, who insisted that the David Fincher film glorified fascism, telling W, “It amazes me how baby boomers reject the art of my generation.”