John Curran’s Stone is a slow-boiling, character-driven drama about spirituality and atonement elevated by its professional cast only to be weighed down by its heavy-handed biblical references and often dense ambiguity.
Edward Norton expertly embodies the titular character, an aggressive, tough-talking inmate eight years into a stint for arson and accessory to manslaughter. Up for early parole, Stone is assigned to Jack Mabry (Robert De Niro), a veteran caseworker with his own violent past. “I don’t want no beef with you,” Stone tells him. “I wanna be a vegetarian.”
The pair strikes a chord, or at least a mutual understanding based on obligation, in their regularly scheduled face-offs. Both are nearing their freedom, as Jack counts the days until retirement from his mundane position and Stone lobbies for his release. “I’m as clean as anybody. Clean as you,” he says to Jack tauntingly, almost knowingly.
Apart, the two souls wrestle with a crisis of faith and identity. Profoundly impacted by a fellow inmate’s brutal shanking, Stone clings to a crackpot dogma about becoming “God’s tuning fork” and, subsequently, focuses on the frequencies in the prison’s ambient noise. Concurrently, Jack numbly tunes out religious talk radio chatter, the Sunday sermon, and the Bible readings of his wife (an underused Frances Conroy) in an utterly loveless, and otherwise uncomfortably silent, marriage.
As their paths diverge, Jack and Stone’s prison exchanges follow a similar inverse pattern, descending into tension-filled dissonance and a deterioration of their initial connection. Blunt, honest conversations give way to cryptic riddle-speak and a murky dynamic fraught with mind games. “God works in mysterious ways,” Stone slyly reminds him. 
Physically, Stone undergoes a transformation, played smoothly by Norton, as he ditches the cornrows and loses the prison yard lingo while Jack turns haggard and volatile.
Complicating affairs is Lucetta (Milla Jovovich), Stone’s stunning wife, who persistently applies pressure on Jack in order to manipulate a positive parole ruling. Inappropriate meetings become sexual rendezvous as the playful temptress gets her way again. It’s the performance of Jovovich’s career, though that isn’t saying much compared to her zombie-killing role of video game fame.
The second collaboration of Norton and Curran (The Painted Veil) — also Norton and De Niro (The Score) — doesn’t quite resonate like their first, but the film’s dueling leads make Stone worth a look.
3.5 out of 5.
