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Parole officer Jack Mabry (Robert De Niro) has a frank chat with prisoner Stone (Edward Norton) in the drama “Stone.” |
To watch Robert De Niro and Edward Norton arguably two of the best film actors of their respective generations play characters verbally wrestling each other for control of a simple conversation becomes one of the few fascinations in “Stone.”
Norton plays Gerald Creeson, a tattooed, cornrowed convict up for possible parole from his sentence for helping kill his grandparents and torch their house to cover up the crime.
He goes by the name Stone.
De Niro plays Jack Mabry, a paunchy, middle-aged probation officer who postpones his impending retirement to hear one last request for clemency, from Creeson.
The two men sit across from each other and talk.
One’s a very tired bureaucrat stuck in a lifeless marriage to a wife named Madylyn (Frances Conroy).
The other is a manipulative survivor who doesn’t think twice about getting his hot girlfriend Lucetta (Milla Jovovich) to use her feminine wiles to convince Mabry to recommend Creeson for parole.
“Stone”, directed by John “The Painted Veil” Curran, has the makings for a hot-and-bothered skin flick playing on a late-night cable channel.
But “Stone” closer simulates an intimate character-driven stage play captured on film.
The domestic drama, the opening night offering last week at the Chicago International Film Festival, is all about how the undermining power of denial can ruin healthy lives.
It has ruined four in this movie alone.
“Stone” opens with a shocking moment from Mabry’s past. Young, new mother Madylyn (now played by Pepper Binkley) tries to escape her suffocating life with her uncommunicative husband, and prepares to leave him.
Mabry (now played by Enver Gjokaj) holds their baby out a second-story window. His terms are brutal and succinct: Leave him and he’ll drop the baby.
And he means it. (Read more…)