JAN 21, 2011
Host Ricky Gervais made all
the headlines with
his scorched-earth jokes at Sunday night's Golden Globes, but Lifetime
Achievement Award recipient Robert De Niro nearly matched him for irreverence,
if not for comic timing. During his jarring stand-up routine of an acceptance
speech, De Niro poked fun at other celebrities, the Hollywood Foreign Press
Association, and his own latest film, the critically reviled Little Fockers. He
even made light of the hard work that he felt had gone unnoticed. Responding to
the introductory clip reel, the actor said: "I think you would've enjoyed
seeing a few seconds of Stanley
& Iris, Everybody's
Fine, Frankenstein, Marvin's Room, Stone. Some of you would be
seeing them for the first time. ... Most of you would be seeing them for the
first time. ... You didn't even watch the screeners, did you?"
That last entry in De Niro's
list of unjustly overlooked movies, Stone, arrives on home video this
week. The 2010 film, directed by John Curran (of the serviceable 2006 W.
Somerset Maugham adaptation The
Painted Veil) and written by Angus MacLachlan (of the superb Junebug), didn't even top $2
million at the domestic box office, despite its event-drama casting of De Niro
opposite Edward Norton. The mixed reviews certainly
didn't help. Too bad, because Stone is an unusually compelling film
featuring performances—from De Niro, Norton, and Milla Jovovich—that stand
shoulder to shoulder with much of the work currently being feted at
coast-to-coast gala ceremonies.
Stone concerns the
push-and-pull between a retiring parole officer, Jack Mabry (De Niro), and a
corn-rowed arsonist and accessory to murder, Gerald "Stone" Creeson
(Norton), who has done eight years out of 10-to-15 in a Detroit penitentiary.
The tight-lipped Jack appears to enjoy golf and not much else. He's unhappily
married, and he has just lost his older brother—the person who, as Jack says in
his eulogy, taught him how to "live right." He is, at least,
respected at work. For his part, Stone will do anything to ensure his early
release. He sends his equally manipulative wife, Lucetta (Milla Jovovich), to
make advances on Jack; sensing Jack will look kindly on a "reborn"
convict, Stone goes shopping for faiths in the prison library.
He comes across a pamphlet,
and an accompanying book, for something called "Zukangor," which
Stone later describes to Jack as a striving, by way of chanting and listening,
to become "God's tuning fork. ... But there's no priest or nothing. It's
not like a religion. There's just this one dude named Arnold who's the
Zuk-master." The Zukangor pamphlet later shows up in the hands of Jack's
wife, Madylyn (Frances Conroy, in perpetual drunken tremor), who dismisses it
as "junk mail." She nonetheless reads it aloud to Jack one night on
the porch, as they sip their customarily enormous amounts of whiskey. "Did
you know you started out as a stone?" she reads from a section of the New
Agey pamphlet that describes the transmigration of souls, suggesting also why
this particular message spoke to Stone in the first place. While Madylyn reads
about the mineral stage of the soul, Curran cuts to what resemble actual rows
of corn.
The jury is out on whether
this shot is meant to subliminally evoke Stone the character and his coiffure
or just as a quick canvassing of the Middle American soil. But Stone does
sometimes lapse into ham-handedness—recurring symbols include relentlessly
buzzing bees and hard-boiled eggs. The mood is likewise applied a little too
thickly. The film's soundtrack, with uncredited contributions from Radiohead's
Jonny Greenwood and Jon Brion, drones rather lugubriously. The atmospherics
really shift into high gear after Stone has what his paperwork describes as
"a profound spiritual epiphany" while witnessing a brutal prison
ambush. But it doesn't appear to be part of the angle he's working: As Stone
shuffles around with an otherworldly look in his eyes (Norton, with the hardest
role here, shifts on a dime from slick operator to space case), he appears to lose
interest in becoming a free man. Meanwhile, Jack carries on an affair with
Lucetta, with their black-background sex scenes appearing to take place in some
sort of void.
For all its stylistic
excesses, though, Stone asks genuinely provocative questions about
belief and redemption. Jack is a nominal Episcopalian and a devout listener to
Christian talk radio. He goes through all the motions, singing hymns at church
and saying grace at home. But he lacks any true convictions, and—perhaps more
crucially to the film's message—the will to confront his own misdeeds, past and
present. He has passed judgment over others for a living, excusing his failings
by comparing them to those of murderers and other miscreants, and thus
essentially refusing to engage in any form of moral introspection. And so Stone
has the power of Zukangor; Madylyn has the Bible; Lucetta, an atheist,
nonetheless sees in life a pattern, a game to be played; and, not unlike A Serious Man's Larry Gopnik,
Jack is simply cast adrift, left to weather the gathering storm of daily
existence with only his own bitterness and self-pity.
Stone, anchored by the
increasingly desperate and resentful character of Jack, is so serious and
despairing that perhaps it's no real surprise that hardly anyone paid to see it
in theaters last fall. But if it's a depressing film, it's rarely gratuitously
so: Each misfortune is a vital part of its inquiry into the nature of
absolution. De Niro certainly isn't wrong in asserting that the film deserves
inclusion in any career-spanning clip reel, alongside his more memorable work.
We want to hear what you
think. Submit a
letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
BENJAMIN MERCER has
written on film for The Village Voice, The New York Sun, The L
Magazine, and Reverse Shot. He is a copy editor at Bookforum.
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