John Curran
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Primal Fear (1996)
Directed by Gregory Hoblit
influenced Stone (2010), The Painted Veil (2006)
Characters
It's yet another of the dual type roles Norton's beginning to specialize in, from the one that broke him out in "Primal Fear" to the more literal double role he takes on in "Leaves of Grass."
Edward Norton shined in début dual-personality as his Primal Fear altar boy conned egocentric lawyer Richard Gere, and he reprises the put-on practice now on corrections parole officer Robert De Niro.
Gerald “Stone” Creeson (Edward Norton, splitting the difference of his “Primal Fear” personas) pleads that he’s been rehabilitated to his parole officer Jack (Robert De Niro), who can’t tell whether or not Stone is playing him.
De Niro looks pained to be here, and Norton performed this jittery liar routine so indelibly in Primal Fear that nothing his character does is surprising.
This prolonged battle of wits between the titular character (Edward Norton), an arsonist who is up for release after serving time for a horrific crime, and Jack Mabry (Robert De Niro), the parole officer who will decide the prisoner's fate, is a lot more ambitious than the crafty-felon thriller Primal Fear, the movie that made Norton an instant star.
Norton’s turn as the titular prison conman Gerald “Stone” Creeson is equally fraught with memories, right back to his 1996 breakout role as the deceptively meek altar boy of Primal Fear.
(It's reminiscent of a similar scene in Terrence Malick's Badlands.)
Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee (“Dallas Buyers Club”) from a screenplay by novelist Nick Hornby, the 1995-set film is an episodic outdoor solo trek in the vein of “Into the Wild” and the recent “Tracks.”
It’s reminiscent of two other recent films, “Into the Wild” and “Tracks.”
Back in September, Mia Wasikowska starred in Tracks , an adaptation of Robyn Davidson’s memoir about her solo trek across the Australian desert in 1977.
Wild is the third movie to be released this year about a woman who goes solo walkabout; there was also Tracks, based on another desert-hike memoir, and the underseen Redwood Highway.
Still, the film could face some competition from John Curran’s equally accomplished “Tracks” (set to open Sept. 19 Stateside), this year’s other adaptation of a bestselling woman-in-the-wilderness memoir, and it remains to be seen whether it can improve on the modest commercial performance of films like “Into the Wild,” “127 Hours” and “All Is Lost.”
One of the things that make Cheryl more complicated and compelling than the heroine of “Tracks” (this year’s earlier woman-schlepping-across-the-desert movie) is that, along the trail, she experiences every encounter with men as fraught with erotic possibility—or trepidation.
Think Emile Hirsch as Chris McCandless in Sean Penn’s 2007 epic Into the Wild, giving his inheritance away to charity and hiking his way to Alaska, or the forthcoming saga Wild, with Reese Witherspoon making her way up the Pacific Crest Trail on foot from the Mexican border to Canada.
So it's like Into the Wild, but terrible, scored as a child or James Horner would score it and directed like a not-on-purpose horror film in the way that people who've never seen any horror films...or other films...shoot in locations like these.
Nor is it a mystery… like, say, the similarly themed Into the Wild , the true story of Christopher McCandless, who starved to death (for reasons still not fully understood ) in the Alaskan wilderness because he was woefully unprepared for life off the grid.
She did great, understated work opposite Edward Norton in the romantic period-piece The Painted Veil, and Viggo Mortensen in 2007’s stellar David Cronenberg underworld drama Eastern Promises.
Director of photography Maryse Alberti (2004's " We Don't Live Here Anymore ") injects each scene with a stunning immediacy, as when the camera is placed on the back of Randy as he works at the deli, his flowing blond locks pulled up in a hairnet.
He was nominated for his first film, Primal Fear (1996) and American History X, (1998).
What the characters will do with this very British cycle of repression, release, and heroic self-denial is rendered in the script, by Ron Nyswaner ( Philadelphia , The Painted Veil ), in sometimes delicate but more often jarringly unsubtle ways.
It’s all quite sensitively and credibly handled by the deft cast, director (and acclaimed stage veteran) Michael Grandage and screenwriter Ron Nyswaner (“Philadelphia,” “The Painted Veil”).