Stone Review

• 21st Mar 2011

Stone is an adaptation of Angus MacLachlan’s 2000 play about a Bible-belt Michigan parole officer who is lured into an affair with the freaky wife of one his cases right before he retires. Bear with me.

The opening scene and first line of dialogue certainly carry the stench of stage melodrama. A young woman announces to her husband that he has “kept her soul in a dungeon” and she’s leaving. As men do in these situations, he dashes upstairs and threatens to chuck their sleeping infant out a window unless she wife stays. Et voilà, marital crisis averted!

Thirty years later Jack and Madylyn are still married and have turned into Robert De Niro and Frances Conroy. Youthful melodrama has been replaced by the stultifying drudgery of late middle age. Conditions in the dungeon may not have improved much for Madylyn’s soul but at least she has chain smoking, jigsaw puzzles, booze and God to keep her company. (Jeez, it really is like prison.)

Jack is about to retire from his job as a parole officer, which he seems to have done ably, if not brilliantly. One of his last cases is Gerald ‘Stone’ Creeson (Norton). Creeson burnt down his grandparents’ house, which would be bad enough even if it hadn’t been done to destroy their mutilated corpses. Creeson wants early release so he can be reunited with his wife. He embarrasses Jack by singing her praises in terms that would make The Artist Once Again Known As Prince blush. “She’s an alien, like from another planet,” enthuses Stone.

All Stone has to do to secure parole is convince Jack that he’s remorseful. He’s many things, but it seems a liar isn’t one of them (the tag line is “Some people tell lies. Others live them”). Before you can say unlikely screen couple of the year, Stone asks Lucetta (Milla Jovovich) to seduce Jack in the hope that her charms will convince him where he can’t. Guess what? Jack, the big lug, can’t wait to drop his pants for her.

As the story builds to its inescapable conclusion, director John Curran sustains a slow-building tension that belies the pulpy nature of his material. True to the script’s origins, scenes have a close, intimate feel and even De Niro avoids chewing on the scenery. In a perfectly pitched scene at his retirement party, Jack hits on a younger co-worker with the immortal line “I’m retiring, not dead.” When she politely rebuffs him, he realises that Lucetta’s been playing him for the old fool he is and he responds with some sexist abuse.

Somehow, Curran manages to avoid unintentional hilarity even while Jovovich is writhing naked on top of a gasping, portly De Niro. For my money, this is Jovovich’s movie hands down. Lucetta’s actions drive the plot and if she weren’t a plausible, believable character the whole thing would fall apart.

Critic Nathan Rabin identified the ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ as a stock film character typified by the likes of Natalie Portman in Garden State and Jennifer Aniston in Along Came Polly. Jovovich’s Lucetta is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl seen through a glass, darkly. Lucetta is charming, alluring and can be sweet and vulnerable when she wants to. She can make a man feel like God’s gift with a glance, but is devoid of the Manic Pixie’s whimsy and cuteness: instead, Lucetta is unhinged to the point of histrionic personality disorder. Her pursuit of Jack is purely sadistic – she just wants to see how much she can mess him up before he snaps.

There are some affected touches that irritate; for example the closer he gets to freedom, the more relaxed Stone’s hairstyles become (from tight cornrows to a jaunty quiff). There is also a tendency to stray too far from the show, don’t tell maxim. We know that Jack has a dark side thanks to his threat of infanticide, we don’t need Madylyn to ask him if he knew he “started out as a stone, worked up to human and will pay off debts in each incarnation”. At such moments there may as well be a subtitle saying “Get it? He started out as a stone!”

It’s easy to reimagine Stone as a Brian de Palma thriller along the lines of Body Double – after all, it wouldn’t take much to turn Lucetta into a modern femme fatale, relocate the action to New York and include a few chase scenes and a gun battle just for fun. Such a treatment could, arguably, have saved Stone from sinking without trace at the box office but it would have been a much poorer film. As a drama, however, Stone is a success.

Clare Moody