(2010) The soul begins as a mineral, a pebble, something inanimate and evolves. Parole officer Jack Mabry (Robert De Niro), nearing retirement, has been married for 43 years to Madylyn (Frances Conroy); their daughter Candace, mother of a three-year-old daughter getting a divorce, as an infant Jack threatened to throw out the upper-story bedroom window of their home when Madylyn told him she wanted to leave him.

He listens to talk radio and religious programs along with watching golf on tv; he attends Episcopalian church services regularly with his devote wife but feels no connection to God. Jack's brother has died; he feels alone in the world. At the prison he interviews inmates to determine whether or not to recommend their early release.

Initially a particularly tough nut to crack, an angry young Caucasian with his hair in corn rows, Gerald "Stone" Creeson (Edward Norton), convicted of accessory to murder and arson (his cousin murdered their grandparents), settles down and engages a colloquy, telling Jack how badly he wants to get back to his beautiful wife and then asking the lawman how he's able to maintain a sexual relationship for so long with the same woman when she's old. "We're not talking about me," Jack crossly reminds Stone.

On her next visit to see Stone at the prison, Lucetta Creeson (Milla Jovovich) agrees - "I would do anything for you" - to personally contact and attempt a seduction of Jack. From an original screenplay by Angus MacLachlan, director John Curran conjures up a swirling miasma of dark mystery and obscure motives.

"You never did anything bad?" Stone inquires of Jack, demanding to know how long he gets to keep judging a person for one mistake. After resisting Lucetta's informal encounters, insisting she must go through official channels, he succumbs to her wiles: "Can't I persuade you?"

In a personal meeting with his priest, asking what God wants for him, Jack's told that God speaks to us in mysterious ways. In what appears to be part of a ploy, Stone begins to study a path toward spiritual enlightenment with aural cues, but the constant noise disturbs his efforts to listen profoundly. He then experiences a genuine epiphany as a witness to two white prisoners brutally attacking and killing a black inmate.

His perspective and attitude radically altered by a spiritual truth - describing it as vibrations such as the sound of a bee growing enormously - Stone tells Jack that he believes in God's plan, accepting what happens as the journey on which he's supposed to be traveling. He also cautions Jack not to listen to Lucetta, an atheist, an alien, a freak, who's "working on you."

Jack, interpreting everything as part of a con game he's trapped within, exclaims: "No one changes for the better!" But Stone offers calm assurance: "I'm pulling for you." At the climax, whether arson (as Jack's certain) or an act of God (as Madylyn, as if peering into a burning bush, believes), awesome flames confound and consume the hollow reed of a man.

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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