John Curran
Stone

I kind of expected it.

After reading here and there and especially after speaking with some friends, I got the impression that Stone wasn't "all that great of a movie" I was expecting. Yet the premises were all there; Robert De Niro and Edward Norton as the main actors: the first a prison psychological counselor close to retirement, the second incarcerated due to complicity in the murder of his grandparents. Stone's (the character played by Norton) goal is to convince Jack (dear old Bob) by proving he has become a new man. However, a game of unspoken words and lies develops between them, which gradually leads to the inevitable ending...

In John Curran's film (already the director of "The Painted Veil" in which he directed Norton as well), the story couldn't stand without the two lead actors. It's they who vie for the center stage with long dialogues facing each other. Perhaps, however, due to this cinematic staticity, the two don't seem to be at their best, although Norton is preferable to a De Niro who seems almost uninterested in the role he was given. Curran shows a lack of particular ideas on how to enliven the film: this is attempted by Milla Jovovich, placed there without much importance. She occasionally appears with an eager look of suffering and then disappears back into bed: several times with Bob De Niro (some scenes are quite ridiculous), other times with the man of the moment.

Stone drags on slowly among dialogues born from a really poor screenplay and real filmic voids: several times one gets the impression that Curran doesn't know where to go and thus takes refuge in the charisma of the two actors. This is probably why Curran's fourth work ends up falling into a reflection on the truthfulness of God, which shares little to nothing with the film. It's a product of Stone's mood changes who, as a perfect cliché of the genre, starts having doubts about his spirituality after spending a lot of time in prison.

There are several factors that prevent "Stone" from reaching sufficiency: actors in shape (but not too much) forced to deal with an inadequate script. A slow pace entirely based on the long dialogues between Jack and Stone and the romantic/existential/spiritual subplots used solely to explain the prisoner's personality. Overall the film is well presented and shot, but it lacks noteworthy events. Curran relies too much on the available actors. And he is wrong...