BAIT: Milla Jovovich makes an attractive trap for a tired parole officer in 'Stone.'

IN JOHN CURRAN'S Stone, a troika of heavy-acting steeds pull in all three directions. Curran (We Don't Live Here Anymore, The Painted Veil) watches in wonder as the leads act up a Force 5 storm, while common sense sneaks out the back exit. Edward Norton, bug-eyed, corn-rowed and saluting Charles Manson, plays "Stone," a longtime convict on a particularly heinous accessory-to-murder charge. Stone is up for parole once again.

Swathed completely in polyester and crumbling like a damp wall is his parole officer, Jack Mabry (Robert De Niro). Stone has a new strategy to get himself released: an elementary honey trap, in the form of his red-hot wife, Lucetta (Milla Jovovich, very improved, if Oscar-stalking). Lucetta ought to be able to get around Mabry, who is this close to retiring and who has a numbed-out relationship with his own aging wife (Frances Conroy, taking the dummied-up approach out of self-defense), who is near-comatose from booze, Jesus and old but justified resentments. Mabry drinks a bit himself. Just as we can always tell that a character coughing in a movie equals imminent death of cancer, a character making a stop at the liquor store means he's three-quarters of the way to alcoholism.

Stone the con ends up conning himself. He hunts for a religion that'll make him look worthy of parole. Teetering on the edge from stir craziness, he discovers "Zukangor," some sort of mail-order creed that makes him insanely passive, right as the trap he engineered snaps. Rural Michigan backgrounds and the exteriors of that state's infamous Jacktown prison, give the film some visually believability. By contrast, Curran's artsy and sometimes windy take on this moth-and-candle game is scripted by Angus (Junebug) MacLachlan: "Previously, he was best known as a playwright ... ," says the press kit. Let's don't change his status on the grounds of a movie that certainly thinks it's a play. Stone is auto-intoxicated with moral relativism (adultery equals murder once again in our sophisticated cinema). The occasional hard-hitting moments give way to a chain of irresolute endings, set to an electronic soundtrack that sounds like a dripping faucet.

Stone

R; 105 min.