On Movies: Norton serves time, but 'it's not a con film'

TORONTO - Edward Norton has been behind bars before.

In fact, the intensely serious actor made his big splash in moviedom playing a Chicago altar boy accused of murder, on trial for his life and messing with Richard Gere's head, in the 1996 hit Primal Fear. A few years later, in American History X, Norton was a neo-Nazi skinhead sentenced to prison on manslaughter charges.

And here he is again.

In Stone, Norton is Gerald "Stone" Creeson, an arsonist doing time at a Michigan penitentiary. He's tattooed. He has cornrows. He talks in the rhythms of the street. And he's doing everything he can to get parole - including encouraging his wife, an unexpectedly strong Milla Jovovich, to seduce the prison official overseeing his case. And that would be Robert De Niro.

Stone, directed by John Curran, opened Friday at the Ritz East and Rave 16 at the Ritz Center/NJ.

"It's not a con film," says Norton, at the Toronto International Film Festival last month for Stone's premiere, and to appear with Bruce Springsteen ("I've known Bruce for a long time - I'm a big fan"), moderating a public conversation at a screening of the documentary The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town.

"Stone is almost allegorical, something more akin to a Bergman film than, say, a thriller, which is why I became interested in it," Norton explains. "John was really looking at the nature of authenticity and spiritual transformation, and not just a caper, not just [a story about] one person trying to manipulate another person."

The scenes between Norton and De Niro - in De Niro's character's office, the two men face-to-face with a desk between them - have the intensity of a stage play. (Indeed, Stone started life as an unproduced theater piece, written by Junebug's Angus MacLachlan.) De Niro's Jack Mabry is just a few weeks from retirement, a man with an empty marriage (to Six Feet Under's Frances Conroy) and an emptiness in his soul.

Norton and De Niro had worked together before - in the problem-plagued heist film The Score, which is best known for being Marlon Brando's swan song. But the two actors vigorously and visibly up the ante in Stone.

"It was definitely, definitely, very gratifying to work again with him," says Norton, who is 41 now, and, like De Niro, lives in New York.