The Stone Boy

Novelist and short story writer Gina Berriault adapts a story she wrote in 1957 into this plaintive movie about a rural Montana family coping after the death of one of their children. Thirteen-year-old Jason Presson stars as Arnold, a farm boy who goes duck hunting one morning and accidentally shoots and kills his brother (Dean Cain) after his gun becomes stuck in a fence. When he tells his parents, Joe (Robert Duvall) and Ruth (Glenn Close), what happened, they react with a mixture of shock and anger. Arnold is deeply disturbed, finding himself unable to speak or communicate much at all. Wilford Brimley plays his compassionate grandfather, who tries to find a way to ease the boy's suffering, but Arnold is bent on escaping this tragic accident he knows he can never undo. At the beginning of this movie, director Christopher Cain (whose long, interesting career includes Young Guns, The Next Karate Kid, and September Dawn) does a fine job of transposing Berriault's internal prose into something visual. The feature film uses its nine-page source material as a first act, and Berriault expands her narrative to focus on the dysfunction of the other family members, especially Arnold's brother (Frederic Forrest). The story's near-silent, passive protagonist becomes more of an observer, trying to assess how much of what he sees occurring is his fault. Cain finds nothing to offset the story's bleakness, and we spend the full 90 minutes submerged in a family's grief and little boy's confusion. The picture illustrates feelings that are mostly held deep within rather than externalized, and the cast does an excellent job conveying complex emotions that are beyond their character's ability to express or even understand. The Stone Boy had a minimal run in select cities and was inexplicably pulled from theaters after just one week, grossing only $261,033. Despite its impressive cast, it's an almost forgotten film.