Old Stone
3.5/5
Old Stone (2016), directed by Johnny Ma, is fascinating (Ma has a keen eye for the little intricacies of life), intimately moving (we watch a man beaten down by the bureaucracy of the Chinese medical system, and his own moral fortitude), and beautifully shot (lush Chinese jungles and the busy, hustling cities in the rain are one and the same), but gradually the film becomes too involved with its own plot, which diminishes its truthfulness by trading in the quiet emotions of a broken man for last-minute theatrics.
Some films aren’t meant to be clever—even though every director seems to want to be Tarantino or the Coen brothers—and yet a remarkable amount feel the need to work into their runtime some kind of ironic/sardonic/eye-winking twist, which, if not executed with a steady hand, can jeopardize the film’s credibility. It’s the sign of a wise and confident filmmaker to allow a film to run without gimmicks and trickery or the drag of plot; great films don’t use plot to tell their stories, because—and I say this with much trepidation—life has no plot, and therefore the films that speak to us most directly are the ones that we are able to see as reflections of our own life.
That said, Old Stone has many absorbing aspects: until the final scene, we watch a man slowly implode under the bewildering pressures of things out of his control; we see how the Chinese medical system is cruelly counter-conscience, valuing procedure and paperwork over human life; we see officials bribed with watermelons and cigarettes; we see a man’s life begin to end because he tries to do the right thing.
Old Stone, simply, is a film that checks one too many boxes—it’s well acted, wonderfully shot, and asks all the right questions, but in the end it forgets what it’s trying to say and shifts unwisely from a cerebral meditation of life and death and money to an on-the-nose thriller desperate to have its oh-so-clever point made.