Stone: do you hear what he hears?

When Jack Mabry (Robert De Niro) calls upon his pastor for spiritual advice he’s told that god speaks to us in mysterious ways, though the pastor may not have imagined the Lord being channeled through a cornrow-sporting, pornographically minded, trash-talking convicted arsonist when he offered up that old chestnut. Mabry’s a parole officer on the verge of retirement, his last case to close being the aforementioned Gerald “Stone” Creeson (Edward Norton), who for all his abrasive locker room jive seems to have a good heart and an earnest desire to get out of jail and get his shit together. Stone comes across some New Agey pamphlet in the prison library that promises spiritual awakening to those who listen for the right sound, those ready to become god’s tuning fork. Stone’s awakening comes one day during lunch while staring at a nature scene mural on the mess hall wall.

Stone was written by Angus MacLachlan, who previously wrote the script for Junebug, based on his own play. Directed by Phil Morrison, Junebug was buoyed on a warm embracing of eccentricity and subtle playfulness with form. Stone, directed by John Curran, is far more somber and downplays its characters’ quirks, though it’s very easy to imagine its premise yielding a comedy, particularly once we factor Stone’s wife Lucetta (Milla Jovovich) into the mix, a talented seductress who's big into the healing power of magnets and aims to boost her husband’s chances of early release by getting cozy with Mabry. As wildly different in tone as Junebug and Stone are, their similarities constitute much of what’s most fascinating in both films: an interest in the line that divides religious practice from spiritual thirst, and in the fundamental role outsiders play in shaping a given community. I settled in for Stone mildly intrigued but expecting little. I was surprised by how deftly that sense of intrigue blossomed and held on right to the end.

Curran’s previous directorial credits include The Painted Veil and We Don’t Live Here Anymore, so it’s no wonder that he seems to take a special interest in flushing out the themes of marital disharmony in MacLachlan’s text. Stone spends much of his first encounter with Mabry boasting about how his wife’s a dime and quite possibly a nymphomaniac, while at the dame time insisting that she’s an alien—that’s the word he uses, “alien,” as in someone from another planet. (Was this picture made before or after The Fourth Kind?) Stone wants to know about Mabry’s marriage, how it works, how sexual interest is sustained over the decades, but Mabry proves to be the real stone in this relationship, refusing to disclose any personal details. The truth is that Mabry’s marriage to Madylyn (Frances Conroy), a tippling Bible thumper, appears deeply unhappy, probably sexless, and has probably been that way from the start, as the film’s disturbing prologue set in the early days of their domestic life clearly implies. This prologue is in fact utterly unnecessary—there’s no reason at all for us to know the specifics of Mabry’s dark side, and this dramatization, awkwardly using younger actors to play De Niro and Conroy, feels like something demanded by outside forces with little faith in an audience’s ability to read between the lines.

Curran doesn’t have the charm or penchant for aesthetic detours that Morrison displayed, but I wonder if his approach isn’t actually more closely aligned to MacLachlan’s intentions. In any case, I don’t think anything he does here really hurts the story’s integrity, and the device of manifesting Stone’s obsession with listening for that magic sound through an aural landscape of Christian radio broadcasts, insect buzzing, and an immersive piece of glassy ambient music from Jon Brion is accumulatively effective. As well, Curran should perhaps take some credit for bringing out the best in his leads. There’s an engrossing chemistry between De Niro and Norton, and a near palpable heat coming off of Jovovich, who imbues what could have been a one-dimensional supporting role with considerable complexity.

I'm not claiming the film is entirely successful on every front, but I worry that some viewers—most certainly some critics—might be put off by Stone simply because it’s hard to tell what this film’s trying to be. I’ve seen it described as a thriller, which feels way off the mark, and I’ve read Manohla Dargis’ New York Times review, which tries to finger at as failed neo-noir, which seems even more off the rails. Stone doesn’t adhere to genre, not does it defy genre in any flamboyant way. I don’t know what to call it, but I think its ambitions are noble and the results substantial… if you only listen closely enough.

The Fourth Kind: Northern exposure or faked Alaska?

At the start of The Fourth Kind Milla Jovovich stands on a turntable while the surrounding forest spins around ominously behind her. She says her name is Milla Jovovich, and she’ll be playing the role of Dr. Abigail Tyler, the Nome, Alaska psychiatrist who back in 2000 underwent a series of almost unimaginably traumatic events, including the death of her husband, her daughter’s sudden blindness, and the repeated abductions of both her and several of her patients by extraterrestrials. Tyler’s trials are the subject of writer/director Olatunde Osunsanmi’s new movie, which is, what? A documentary? A thriller? A steaming pile of bullshit? Let’s say that in one sense or another it’s all three. Jovovich warns us that some of the images we’re about to see may disturb us. Given what audiences these days are accustomed to being put through, the implication seems to be that what’ll make these images so disturbing is that they’re real, people. Okay, I mean, maybe!

If The Fourth Kind wasn’t already sufficiently afflicted with dubiousness by being set in the state recently governed by Sarah Palin, it must really be pissing off Osunsanmi and his people that the movie’s coming out so soon after the runaway success of Paranormal Activity, a horror film that worked even when audiences knew it was bullshit. The continual reminders that everything we see and hear in The Fourth Kind is either the real thing—ie: ostensible archival video recordings, including one of a murder-suicide, usually interrupted by bursts of distortion when something really wild happens—or a re-enactment of extraordinarily high productions values, is initially annoying and eventually just comical, a glossier, more intrusive spin on the Unsolved Mysteries tack. Osunsanmi frequently runs the archival stuff right alongside the reenactments in flashy split-screen, as if to emphasize how meticulously he’s restaged everything, while the rest of us sit there wondering why the hell he didn’t just let the real thing speak for itself, especially since the grainy video footage constitutes what are by far the most chilling moments in the movie. The aliens apparently speak Sumerian, and let me tell you that language is just plain freaky.

The “real” Abigail Tyler, interviewed in a cheesy-looking studio by a gentle if barely interested Osunsanmi, shows up a lot, walking us through the story. She appears, perhaps as a result of her trauma, to be in pretty rough shape these days, her orb-like eyes tired, her hair full of split ends, her skin so pale it’s nearly gray. It feels like a sick joke—the woman clearly resembles the popular image of an alien, the sort that share a lot of screen-time with Christopher Walken in Communion. If this poor woman really is a victim of even half of what she claims, you’d think the filmmakers would offer her the dignity of a shampoo at least. But this is only one example of how Osunsanmi over-calculates his attempts at verisimilitude. It’s as though he worries the movie’s interest will evaporate completely if we start to doubt its basis in truth. To be sure, several scenes are pretty riveting, pretty unnerving, and supporting turns from the likes of Elias Koteas and Will Patton help flesh out the story and sense of place immensely. But the amateurish fumbling with formal tropes distance as often as they involve, and the last third or so suffers from meandering inconclusiveness.

None of these criticisms are meant as attacks on those who identify with the phenomenon addressed in The Fourth Kind, per se. The abundance of abduction stories of that pile up year after year most often incite dismissive laughter, but the task of engaging an audience in conversation about just what it is that generates such crippling trauma in so many people strikes me as a perfectly noble project. I just I wish it was handled differently. There was a guy sitting near me at my screening of The Fourth Kind—there were a lot of us, so I don't think I'm outing anyone here—who was clearly intensely affected by something happening onscreen. I considered asking him if he was okay but didn’t want to make him too self-conscious, at least not in the middle of the screening. I lost track of him afterwards. If nothing else I’d have liked to ask him what he thought of the movie, if it felt a little too close to something he’d experienced, whatever that might be. Maybe Osunsanmi did something substantial after all, shaking loose something latent in his audience. Maybe we better start setting up trip wires around our beds at night.