Stone (2010)

John Curran's Stone arrives with the solemn self-regard of a chamber piece that believes it is saying something profound about men, sin, and the fires we set. Robert De Niro plays Jack Mabry, a parole officer weeks from retirement, and Edward Norton plays the arsonist who wants out early. They circle each other across a prison table, trading dialogue that the press materials surely called sparring. The film opens with a man dangling his own daughter out a window to keep his wife from leaving, which sets a tone the rest of the runtime struggles to match. What follows is a slow, humid descent into mutual manipulation, and it is rendered with the kind of heavy-handed symbolism that critics at the time found hard to forgive. Every object means something. Every silence is a sermon. The spiritual awakening literature Stone reads is not subtle, and neither is the fire that closes the loop.

The cultural inventory here is remarkably sparse. The cast is white and the story never once glances at that fact, because race is simply not its business. There are no queer currents, no environmental sermonizing dressed up as arson, no economic grievance against the wealthy, no meditation on bodies or brains that work differently. Milla Jovovich's Lucetta is deployed as a seductress and a bargaining chip, which is a conventional arrangement and not a manifesto. The film's moral instruction runs entirely toward old-fashioned questions of guilt, faith, and whether a man can be forgiven. Madylyn reads the house fire as divine punishment. That is the register. It is theology, not sociology.

What remains is a picture that preaches without a modern congregation. The sermonizing is real, but it is aimed at the soul, not at society, and audiences stayed home in sufficient numbers to make the point moot. We are left with two fine actors playing against type in a film that mistakes murk for depth. It is not offensive. It is merely certain of itself, which in this line of work is almost never enough.