Stone, 2010

Stone, 2010
Director: John Curran
Cast: Robert de Niro, Milla Jovovich, Edward Norton



Stage: home theatre, with a slightly worse sound that it was supposed to be.

Stone in short: Parole officer Jack Mabry (Robert De Niro) has only a few weeks left before retirement and wishes to finish out the cases he's been assigned. One such case is that of Gerald "Stone" Creeson (Edward Norton), a convicted arsonist who is up for parole. Jack is initially reluctant to indulge Stone in the coarse banter he wishes to pursue and feels little sympathy for the prisoner's pleads for an early release. Seeing little hope in convincing Jack himself, Stone arranges for his wife Lucetta (Milla Jovovich) to seduce the officer, but motives and intentions steadily blur amidst the passions and buried secrets of the corrupted players in this deadly game of deception


Preps: hmmm, famous cast makes me believe this could be one of better ones in the genre. Otherwise, this prison playground is lately a bit abused by many directors, many bad movies lately on the topic. Nevertheless, I am confident it will be at least an average one.



Reality: What is the ultimate thing you will do to get your ass out of prison? How much is it worth to you and do you consider involving the ones that are close to you? This I would claim to be the top theme of this piece, very profound put into the hands of Norton (Stone), that is trying to shorten his sentence. To him, all means to do that lay at hand. All the time I am thinking that his beautiful wife is just sitting there, waiting for him to come out. Ups, a mistake. She's not really waiting, not really with all the virtues behind her wait. She's actually messing around with other. In this sense, she holds no true objections to seducing this parole hot shot (De Niro). De Niro again in a role of a strong half-villain, in a citizen duty role, but acting as a bitch towards his last case (Stone).

Doing a proffession like this for your whole life must truly be a pain in the ass. I mean, you get depressed just by watching this misery and all the bad persons sitting behind bars, the role of a parole officers is to listen to excuses about what they've done and how much change they have been undergoing since entering the prison. For some of them this might be the absolute truth, but who is God enough to be diferring good ones from bad ones only judged by their words and a talk every now and then? De Niro has this Godly act here, as he decides whether the convicts are going to be in prison longer or not. What does it take to get his mind elsewhere - well, for sure MIlla Jovovich in her devine suit could contribute to the cause :)

The simple plot turns into a psychological game, that includes a lot of static dialogues, lots of misery and bad charma. I am speaking about lots of talks between the wife and the convict. What do you talk about, when questions like "how are you" are truly trivial and unimportant?

The scenery is impressive, used to be one of the largest walled prisons, located in Michigan. Apart from that scene and some coffee shops and households (home environment) of the main protagonists, you don't see much. The way she seduces him seems profound, but actually it's limited to her big eyes and some sucking up to his profession, wearing tight shirts at the same time.

No big excitement in this movie, but also nothing for you not to be seeing it. A bit of an average piece, lovely to see Jovovich and Norton in action again, quite relieving that De Niro exceeds those stupid comedies (the Fockers) he's been involved into lately.


My personal rating: 5,5 (nothing really special, but a decent shot at the genre).


Stone on IMDB