Film Flam

Stone (2010)

Growing up, Robert De Niro meant a lot to me. His work in the 70’s, filled with an alienation and pain, made him more human being than movie star in my eyes. Generations were affected by his soul-scraping work. Edward Norton was clearly influenced by him. His work in John Dahl’s Rounders is his homage Mean Streets Johnny Boy; his nameless character in Fight Club carries the names of De Niro characters, The King of Comedy’s Rupert Pubkin, Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle. De Niro’s shadow looms large over Norton’s work.

A few years ago, like most, I flocked to see De Niro, Norton and the grandfather of method acting Marlon Brando in The Score. Today, I couldn’t tell you a single thing about that movie. A plot-driven piece designed to make money and not necessarily convey any of the emotions of its players, the movie has since gone on to be deservedly forgotten by the majority of audiences.

I haven’t followed De Niro’s career for some time now. With studio fare like Meet the Fockers and Limitless it seemed that De Niro had given up or found little reward in doing dramatic films; but Stone proves otherwise. Stone, if nothing else, is notable for the return of De Niro’s exploration of characters who are haunted by an anguished existensialism and a deep internalization of emotions caused by fits of philosophical ideas that mock more than they heal.

But don’t get me wrong, there is also a great deal of De Niro phoning things in. With age De Niro has decided to spend energy only on ideas that interest him. The uninteresting gets tossed aside. Like an employee repeating a task for the millionth time; it’s just not worth the emotional strain of reaching. As such, those scenes are forgetttable.

But there are a few scenes that display that De Niro’s razor sharp attention to concepts that interest him. In those scenes, you can see him reaching for the ideas that he had explored so long ago.

The anguish, the anger, and the pain are all still there. None of it with a home. God’s lonely man drives from home to work, if there is good in him or the world, he can’t see it anymore. Nor does he understand the nature of good. Nearing retirement, he sees years that have gone by with more questions than answers. In the time he’s lived the rage inside of him hasn’t been quenched by wisdom, it’s been fueled by indignities, lies, and the failure of the world around him. A man in search of an absolute truth, he seen the answer like a light in the forest, flickering on and off. The peace that he chases would come if he could only reach it long enough to understand it. It’s amazing to watch De Niro articulate the feelings of that shifting goalpost.

It is the feeling that things will work out if only you can believe something that every fiber in your body tells you is wrong and stupid. There’s a part of De Niro’s character that screams to be stupid, to be evil and carefree, but he can’t, and when he tries it only causes the anger in him to circle around again to it’s point of origin: himself.

And so, that’s what Stone turns out to be; a portrait of a spinning top, emotionally it just goes round and round, when it comes in contact with an object it’s inertia is altered some but still it spins on the axis of it’s own rage. These are the bits of Stone that carry a solid emotiional weight, but others are too light and ebb into ideas that are interesting but aren’t articulated well and end up being buried under a great heaps of detritus.

Stone is by no means garbage. It’s simply a film that doesn’t know who it is. It’s in twenty different places at once. All of them interesting. Every character has a motivation and it’s not one you can fully understand or endorse; leading to feelings of disinterest or lack of trust in the movie and where its going. Because you never really trust it, you never really feel too let down when it gets both of you lost on a different path to who knows where.

Along the road through the film you come across interesting ideas, but never stay long enough to care. There’s the node of Edward Norton’s character as De Niro’s Tyler Durden, that doesn’t really come to frution. There’s also a mild Christian-conservative theme that gets very little attention. Milla Jovovich emits an transfixing energy and control between sexual power and female vulnerabilty — it’s a typical female role but she plays it with extrodinary agility. Her performance, as well as everyone else’s, is cut short but what soils the rest of the film; brusque editing and indifferent direction.

It’s hard to blame this on anyone in particular. It’s a bit painful to watch, so many compelling elements, ultimately squandered. You get to understand what it’s like for De Niro’s character, you search the landscape of the film for beauty, for truth, and just when you think you can stand beside it — it’s slippery hand falls from yours and you’re left with disappointment and anger.

I thought I understood… but it’s just more bullshit.