Maybe you've heard this joke before: if there's ever a nuclear holocaust, the only ones that will survive are the New York City cockroaches and Keith Richards.
No one ever suspected that Brian Jones might be there with them. As Keith once said to him, "You'll never make it past 30, man." Brian's simple answer: "I know." In the Stones circle, almost everyone agreed. Jones was destined for early destruction. He was what the other Stones clearly were not: physically and mentally weak, paranoid, and unable to handle the world of sex, drugs and rock n' roll--particularly the drugs--to excess.
The death of Brian Jones "by misadventure" in the summer of 1969, drowned in his swimming pool, was one of the first major rock n' roll casualties, soon followed by Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison. The event immediately spawned an army of conspiracy theories, in the vein of Elvis or JFK.
As sudden and shocking as Jones' death was, it seemed inevitable. The coroner's report noted severe damage to his kidney, heart and liver, due to excessive quantities of drugs and alcohol. Still, a question has persisted over the years: who killed Brian Jones?
Stephen Woolley, in this dismal directorial debut, has taken it upon himself to answer the question, pointing an accusing finger at Frank Thorogood, the working class, one-eyed, World War II vet hired by the Stones to look after Jones in his final days.
Basing his theory on three whodunit Jones bios and a supposed deathbed confession made by Thorogood in 1993, Stoned is basically a conspiracy theory enacted--or rather, re-enacted--in a style not dissimilar to those true crime re-enactments on A&E or
Unsolved Mysteries, going back and forth between the dead man's final days, and grainy black and white flashbacks of the events leading up to the big deadly moment. Some stock footage and MTV-inspired video montages are also thrown in.
The re-enactments are styled around a swimming pool on Jones' rambling country estate (ironically, the former home of
Winnie-The-Pooh author A.A. Milne). Given
Brian's isolation and erratic behavior, management brought in a minder--with the unlucky job going to the sullen Thorogood (Paddy Considine), who arrives practically wearing a 'Kick Me' t-shirt.
Thorogood ostensibly took the job as a builder on the estate, while assuming the benign overall duty of "keeping an eye on Brian." Instead, he ends up playing the William Holden part from Sunset Boulevard. But wait, he's also playing the James Fox role from Performance. And, he has a third role: the Dirk Bogarde part from The Servant.
Thorogood quickly finds himself in a dangerous, sexually-charged triple feature. Jones (Leo Gregory), now teamed up with his sneering Swedish girlfriend Anna Wohlin (Tuva Nuvotny), puts Thorogood through the ringer, in a series of perverse servant-master
humiliations. When Jones and Thorogood's "best friend" Tom Keylock (David Morrissey), the Stones point-person who brought him in, withhold payment to Frank and his team of construction laborers, Thorogood can't take it any more, and sets out to get even.
But it's all just a typical day at Pooh Corner.
Nastiness is the specialty of the house at Brian's. Narcissistic and cruel, Jones reigns like a king of all wild things on his island of spoiled children.
