The parole officer's name is Jack, and the film opens with a scene of he and his wife. His wife is obviously feeling distraught and trapped, and threatens to leave him. He runs upstairs after hearing this, picks up their sleeping daughter, and threatens to throw her out of the window is she leaves him. She doesn't obviously, and we fast forward to their golden years, where nothing much seems to have changed. And this is where the story begins.
Jack is a parole officer about to retire, and his last account is a young punk who calls himself Stone. Stone was convicted for accessory to murder and arson, the victims were his grandparents. Stone is a big talker, and eventually gets his very attractive wife involved to... convince him to let her husband go free. This sounds just like any other con movie, but (and of course anything with Edward Norton in it..) it goes deep than that. Throughout this process, Stone becomes increasingly entranced with this religion supporting the idea that we gain spirituality through our senses, through sounds and the like. There are various buzzing and droning noises throughout the sound scape of the film, and Stone interacts with noise and sound continuously throughout the film. Concepts of noise and silence in the physical world and the relation to the noise and silence within your own self.
Religion and the idea of spiritual connectedness play a large part in this film. Jack attends church every week with his wife (still long-suffering), and yet feels no connection to the faith. He confides to the priest on one occasion that he envies his wife's and daughter's ability to feel connected, but it just seems to get harder and harder for him. He seems to be most bothered by Stone's rising connectivity, which coincides with his further spiritual decline. Jack has never seemed particularly happy with his life, but in his dealings with Stone, it comes to light that not only is he not happy, he is connected to nothing, nothing is important to him. He doesn't care about anything or anyone. Maybe this is why he so easily falls into the 'con' planned by Stone and his wife.
Something else the film deals with is the idea that we're really harsh on people who get convicted for something they've done wrong, and it's not wrong for us to keep the peace, but there are people who do 'bad' things every day, and just aren't caught, or aren't even told that what they're doing is wrong, but they also destroy people's lives.
The movie end with Jack's wife reading some reincarnation theory saying that we all start out as stones, and work our way up the chin of beings until we become human, and we do that to pay for our sins in previous lives. Which ties into the spiritual growth, and maybe even to the ability to process sound on some level.
This was a worthwhile film. It was thought-provoking and gritty. It's not a movie to watch when you're in one of those 'feel good' moods, but it's definitely worth your time.
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