Stone (2010)

Director: John Curran. Cast: Robert De Niro, Milla Jovovich, Edward Norton.

/content/films/3928/2.jpgFirst five minutes—striding a forty-year distance across a marriage—may be the most disturbing of the year in cinema

A disturbing character study and a morality play that actually entertains discussions of what constitutes right and wrong, justice, God, sin

“Why do you get to walk around free and I don’t?...You never did anything bad?”

“I’m different than when I come in here…reborn.” The notion of being born-again strikes a chord with Jack

“The Power of Zukangor” (“the sound and the light of God”)

Flourishes of black humor

Skillful duets

We’re all capable of doing terrible things

As a parole case worker, he sits in judgment—playing God, if you will

His mild-mannered mask hides wellsprings of repressed lust and rage

school ring/championship ring

Built-up resentment

“No one changes for the better.”

The suggestion that explosive self-destruction is a good thing, the way to be born again

Episcopalian churchgoer but the God stuff doesn’t come easily to him; what does is the Christian guilt

Despite that guilt, as a white bourgeois male, he has a sense of entitlement: sin first, ask questions later

His one condition: “Nobody can know about this.” (see above)

both express borderline-suicidal despair

disconnect and unhappiness

“answering for the things that you’ve done”

Isolated home

a hard drinker and a couch potato

Short with his wife

Cacophonous chorus of Christian talk radio like voices in his head (the show to which he devotedly listens is called "All Voices Under God")

Stone: "Sometimes I think the best thing is to just listen."

The ambiguous perception of buzzing: clarity, evil, madness?

Domestic noir

She’s an atheist who does what she pleases (and teaches kids to do good for the sake of doing good)

Sly

They have to prostrate themselves, confession-style

Sporting fresh cornrows, the raspy “Stone” has done eight years of a ten-to-fifteen sentence for arson and accessory to manslaughter

"I got a mouth, I know."

nine years married

Cast the first one?

Achieves a kind of enlightenment

Free will

“He lived right. What more could you want people to say about you?”

subtle, unsettling sound design and score

subtlety with co-worker

Frances Conroy

cleaning (holy?) fire