Stillwater: Working-class Bill Goes to Marseilles and It’s No Emily in Paris
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C
In the new Tom McCarthy film Stillwater, Matt Damon stars as Bill, an unemployed oil-rigger from Stillwater, Oklahoma, who heads to the French port city of Marseilles to try to help his daughter, Allison (Abigail Breslin) who is in prison for a murder of her girlfriend, an Arab-French girl named Lina.
The story is obviously based on the Amanda Knox case, the American college student who was jailed in Italy for four years, and later exonerated, for the murder of her roommate. Just as obviously, McCarthy — a director of humane inspirational films (The Station Agent, The Visitor, and the Oscar-winning Spotlight) — has ideas beyond dramatizing tabloid fodder.
The trouble is not that the movie is exploitative but that it’s out of its depth. This tone-jumping jigsaw of a narrative (written by McCarthy and Marchus Hinchey along French screenwriters Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré) amounts to several movies in one.
After a frosty initial reunion in the prison visiting room, Allison tells her father she has new information about an Arab youth named Akim as a suspect in Lina’s death. She asks her father to deliver to her lawyer with a hope of reopening the case. The lawyer is dismissive, but instead of passing on the bad news, Bill lies to his daughter to keep her hopes up. He decides to find a way of reopening the case himself.
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Breslin’s performance is too brittle and withholding, and Damon too awkwardly restrained, to create much emotional resonance. But things warm up when Bill enlists the aid of free-spirited theatre actress, Virginie (Camille Cottin, of Call My Agent) who he met at his hotel with her biracial nine-year-old daughter, Maya (Lilou Siavaud).
After Bill decides to stay in Marseille, joining a crew of migrant workers, Virginie offers him a room to rent in her apartment, where he bonds with Maya. Though Bill — with his ubiquitous trucker cap and plaid shirts, who says grace, owns two guns and has American bald eagle tattoo — seems an unlikely fit with this left-wing French bohemian theatre artiste, it has a certain wacky charm, thanks largely to performances of Cottin and the child actress Siavaud.
The least convincing and clumsiest strand of the movie is the thriller part. After getting help finding photographs of Akim on social media, Bill sets out to track him down. Bullying his way through the immigrant projects to apprehend Akim, the story turns progressively more violent and absurd, and can only be understood as a laboured analogy the U.S. government’s post-9/11 anti-terrorist methods. The recognition of his own blind spot is intended as Bill’s redemption.
In The Way Back, a movie that was released last year, Ben Affleck — Damon’s old friend and co-Oscar winner for Good Will Hunting —played a similar character: A divorced alcoholic construction worker in small-town California, who has a chance to coach basketball at the high school.
There are a lot of connections between Jack and Bill’s characters as studies in midlife disappointment and pained stoicism: Their shlubby muscle-turning-to-fat physiques, unfussy facial hair, the characters’ history of grief and substance abuse, the redemptive relationship with a young person of colour.
Both characters are gruffly sympathetic representatives of that “white male non-college educated demographic” the media were so keen to understand after the 2016 elections, and the movies leave you wondering, have they had enough sympathy yet?
Stillwater. Directed by Tom McCarthy. Written by Tom McCarthy, Marcus Hinchey, Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré. Starring Matt Damon, Abigail Breslin, Camile Cottin, Lilou Siauvaud, Idir Azougli, and Deanna Dunagan. In theatres July 29.