Between a stone and a hard place

A story about God, forgiveness and guilt all dressed up as a psychological thriller. Edward Norton, thin and insinuating, stars as Stone, a convict trying to talk his way out of jail and Robert De Niro is Jack, his God-like parole officer, a man filled with doubts. When Stone recruits his sexy wife (Milla Jovovich) to seduce Jack, the movie lands in a complex area between prison drama and ontological argument, a territory it can’t comfortably inhabit.

Starring: Edward Norton, Robert De Niro, Milla Jovovich

Rating: Three stars out of five

The new Edward Norton-Robert De Niro film Stone is a psychological thriller that has no appetite for it.

There’s a clash of ideas — one character is a criminal trying to get out of jail, the other is the God-like parole officer who can make it happen — but it takes place mostly on a spiritual plane, and if there’s a gun on the bedside table and late-night noises in the hallway, they don’t mean much compared to the hollow ringing in the soul.

Stone is a kind of trick perpetrated by John Curran (We Don’t Live Here Any More): a drama about religious malaise all dressed up as Primal Fear 2, complete with a manipulative convict who may or may not be guilty.

We can see it coming until we cannot, and the movie’s answer is that there is no answer. This makes it dubious as a thriller but interesting as a character study.

Norton plays Gerald "Stone" Creeson, a long-term prisoner in jail for killing his grandparents. Reed thin, with cornrows, tattoos, an indefinable accent that sounds vaguely southern-menacing — the film is set in Detroit — and a kind of hectoring intelligence, Stone insists he’s ready for the outside world.

The man he has to persuade is Jack (De Niro), a prison parole official whom we meet — in the film’s prologue set decades earlier — interrupting a golf game on TV to threaten to kill his daughter if his wife ever leaves him. When we see Jack again, all we know is that there is something in him that the years may or may not have cured.

There’s a sly chemistry to the scenes between Stone and Jack, a power struggle made up of their different positions and their commitment to the life of the mind. Jack goes to church, but in his silent evenings with his wife (Frances Conroy) and his no-nonsense dealings with his co-workers, we sense that he’s playing out a string. Stone seems to know that religion is one of the keys to his release: he’s confrontational but carefully so. "I don’t want no beef with you," he tells Jack. "I just want to be a vegetarian."

But he sees something in the prison official that he can use to leverage his freedom, an emptiness that he offers to fill with his wife Lucetta (Milla Jovovich), who’s sexy, playful, manipulative and amoral. He asks her to insinuate herself into Jack’s life.

Lucetta’s omnivorous sexuality is set over an atmosphere of blue-collar fundamentalism that make Stone into a kind of rust-belt Gothic. There is almost no music; the soundtrack is provided by a religious radio station where an announcer’s brimstone messages ("we sin because we are sinners") play like the subconscious ticking of economic desperation.

The religious subtext extends to Stone, who may or may not be undergoing a genuine conversion to a strange sect that believes it is in sounds that we hear God’s message, and that we are all His holy tuning forks.

The result is an ambiguous drama whose genre is entirely sui generis, a spiritual con game about the hypocrisy of forgiveness, at least the official kind. It’s a movie that has bitten off way more than it can safely digest — Stone’s flirtation with his cult is sudden and unpersuasive — but is as weighty as its title.

For Jay Stone’s weekly movie podcast, go to www.canada.com/moviereviews.