Matt Damon fights for his daughter in Stillwater, an unusual drama from the director of Spotlight
The movie takes writer-director Tom McCarthy's usual quiet character studies in a different, fascinating direction
Film Reviews SPOTLIGHT
Writer-director Tom McCarthy often works in a quiet, unadorned style. He’s also capable of affection for his characters that can verge on overbearing. In 2015, these qualities were inadvertently placed at odds through a pair of films he happened to release in the same year, one an exacting Best Picture winner and the other a squishy (and uncharacteristically misconceived) disaster. Six years later, Stillwater reunites both sensibilities in what should be his most ill-fitting film yet: a ground-level thriller that takes frequent, extended time-outs for characters to experience likable bonding sessions.
The story has sensationalistic roots; it’s vaguely inspired by the case of Amanda Knox, an American exchange student living in Italy who was convicted of murdering her roommate, spent four years in prison, and was later acquitted. Stillwater joins a similar situation already in progress. Allison (Abigail Breslin) is serving out a sentence in France for the murder of her girlfriend, the implied media circus surrounding her trial has faded, and her father, Bill (Matt Damon), clearly has a routine going. He checks into a Best Western in Marseille for two-week stints, eats primarily at American-based fast-food outlets, and despite having clearly spent a substantial amount of time in France, steadfastly speaks to everyone in English. His frequent use of “ma’am” sounds especially deliberate, announcing himself as both a faux-humble gentleman and someone who refuses to use a single word of French.
Bill and Allison both hail from Stillwater, Oklahoma, and the former’s abiding midwestern dadness belies his past as a screw-up and an addict, unable to fully compensate for the loss of Allison’s mother. (Allison, we learn, was raised largely by her grandmother on her mom’s side, as her dad did time on oil rigs.) So Bill seems determined to make amends, especially when Allison thinks she has a lead on a suspicious character she encountered the night of the murder who could exonerate her, if only someone could track him down. She asks Bill to deliver the message to her lawyer, who rejects the information as too little, too late. This inspires Bill to stay in Marseille a little longer and start snooping around; the investigation proceeds haltingly, but he makes some headway. There’s additional tension in a selfish lie he tells Allison: that the lawyer, not her unreliable dad, is enthusiastically following her lead. It’s as if by hiding the truth and getting the job done himself, he can will his life into a Liam Neeson revenge thriller or an underdog courtroom drama.
Yet Stillwater is not some Taken-style fantasy in which Hollywood liberal Matt Damon dresses in red-state drag to mete out American justice. By chance, Bill gains a translator in Virginie (Camille Cottin), an actress also staying at the hotel while she prepares to move into a new apartment with her young daughter, Maya (Lilou Siauvaud). Bill takes a gentle shine to Maya, and that’s where McCarthy’s humanistic instincts go into overdrive. What has been a downbeat amateur-detective thriller becomes a sweet-natured character study about a stereotypically Ugly American adapting to an unexpected new home life.
Is the movie having a conservative-coded character—he demurs on the question of voting for Trump, only by grace of a felony conviction—reform himself to please left-leaning audiences? Or is McCarthy flattering conservative sensibilities by avoiding pesky politics and hiding handsome Matt Damon underneath wraparound sunglasses and a baseball hat? Damon’s performance leaves room for both, which is probably why Bill occasionally feels like a delicate act of politicking rather than a fully believable human. Some early scenes especially clang, with Breslin overdoing her character’s obvious frustration.
But as Stillwater goes on, it becomes easy enough to forget about actorly affectations—the way Damon suppresses his boyish grin and wiseass verbal acuity—and just follow his character through an ever-shifting series of new-normal circumstances. The movie continues to bob and weave, predictable moments knocking against unexpectedly heart-wrenching ones. Rather than undermining the film’s effectiveness, the awkwardness of this marriage between gentle found-family dramedy and peril-fraught melodrama keeps it oddly compelling. The American desire for catharsis and a more European tendency toward observation creates an unspoken internal conflict; at times, the movie feels like an ongoing game of How French Will This Get?
The game stretches well past the two-hour mark. This isn’t McCarthy’s tightest film, nor is it a successor to Spotlight in terms of invigorating, fact-based filmmaking. (To re-emphasize: Amanda Knox really is just a jumping-off point.) It may, however, be his knottiest and most complicated. Early on, the film undermines expectations of a dad heroically fighting the odds for his child—and then, as Bill, Virginie, and Maya come to better understand each other, manages to create a whole new set of expectations to subvert. It’s the first time McCarthy has made such prickly use of his talent for summoning audience sympathy, allowing Bill’s regrets about his parental shortcomings to resonate through his every decision. It’s as if the filmmaker is poking at his past faith in the modest American loneliness of his characters, wondering if maybe they were too good to be true.
47 Comments
Eddie Lee Capers is NOT happy about this (no word yet from J.W. Stillwater).
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Curse this positive review! I had already mentally consigned this to the Will Not Watch bin, but I didn’t realize it was Tom McCarthy, or that it might be worth seeing.
Though Tom McCarthy doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily worth seeing.The scars from The Cobbler will never truly heal.
I remember those Papa Roach lyrics:“Tear my heart open, and I’ll The Cobbler myself shutAnd my weakness is, that Tom McCarthy cares too muchAnd our scars remind us that the past is real…”
Matt Damon as Leonardo DiCaprio as Jebediah McInbred in “Red State Reckoning: Mission to Marseille”.
I lol’d.
I see I’m not the only one who has watched and re-watched MST3K.
So this is not a sequel to Almost Famous. Color me disappointed.
Don’t look at me; I’m just one of the out-of-focus guys.
That’s one of my favourite line readings ever.
Lee hollering “I’m only the fucking LEAD SINGER” as the bus drives away always gets me. What a great performance.
“I’m the front man, and you’re the guitarist with mystique. That’s the dynamic we agreed on!”
There seems to have a lot of the same tired old cliches built into this, intentionally or not. And the trailer and plotline description reek of Trying Too Hard. Pass for me.
Please don’t watch this movie or encourage others to do so…it will just sow confusion about the real Stillwater who is a vigilante hero and not a fan boat mechanic in Cumberland County Florida.
OK, I love comics but you guys are getting to Comedy Bang Bang fans level of myopia here with the references to whatever comic this is!
oh that’s literally a comedy bang bang reference, a long-running paul f. tompkins character
hahaha SON OF A BITCH
Ya’ll hear a crime go? (I want you to know that I signed into Kinja for the first time to make sure your comment was appropriately appreciated!)
Spoken like a truly concerned citizen. . .
This sounds pretty damn good to me (Spotlight and The Station Agent are enough to make me a McCarthy fan for life), but I’m guessing it’ll be a while before it hits theaters in Spain.
Oh fuck yeah The Station Agent
Also The Visitor and Win Win are definitely worth watching if you enjoyed those 2. He also worked on the screenplay for Up.
Yeah, very much enjoyed The Visitor. Can’t remember if I saw Win Win, will have to check it out.
August 13th, so just a couple of weeks.
Do not see this movie: despite its name, it has nothing to do with vigilante crime-fighting hero J. W. Stillwater, a.k.a. Eddie Lee Capers.
I met McCarthy at a screening back when he was promoting The Visitor. One of my favorite directors, and a really nice guy too.
I’m almost glad that I knew his directorial work before I saw The Wire because Scott Templeton was such a cunt that I almost get how some people get lost in the distinction between actor and character.
You just blew my mind
So this is not related to the currently being published comic by Chip Zdarsky?https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/stillwater-by-zdarsky-p%C3%A9rez
So I traveled outside of my home state for the first time in a couple years last week. I feel like about 60% of every man under 60 looked like Damon’s character here. It’s like every single one of them views looking like a fat MAGA as aspirational. Frankly, people in this country in general are looking worse than ever.
It seemed too niche (and/or crass) to say that he’s styled to look like every MAGA dipshit’s profile photo but…………. I was thinking it.
So, does Damon “git ‘er done” in this film?
Matt The French Cable Guy?
If there’s a scene of him Facetiming in his car wearing Oakleys, we’ll know what the director was going for…
It’s the wraparound sunglasses perched on top of the hat that hits the look perfectly.
I can’t wait to get out, however I do it. Maybe I emigrate to the UK, maybe I die from the incurable illness which currently costs my company’s insurance company an enormous amount for treatment, so if I can’t keep my job I have to find a new chemo sugar daddy, leading to the end of me when my treatment stops. Whatever America is now, it is not the great country I was raised to believe in, where we were asked by President Kennedy to ask what we could do for our country. Trumpism has turned the USA into a toilet brimming with idiocy.
Reading between the lines there, it sounds like his daughter is guilty.
IMHO Matt Damon comes off as disingenuous when trying to play an everyman.
Fuck yeah Scott Templeton.
The photo to the left of the grade: Leo called; he wants his DNA back.
So this isn’t about vigilante hero J.W Stillwater?
Over the past few years I have been forced to flush numerous Trump-supporting friends and members of my family, and in two cases two families of friends, in the firm belief their allegiances were based on his belligerent, middle-school-bully brand of racism which is incompatible with my values. Their utter, pig-headed unredeemability is a result of their steady diets of rightwing propaganda and their own hidden racist feelings, now freed by cover statements such as “I like his policies!” and “He’s the most Christian president we’ve ever had!” and so on. I’m not gullible enough to take any of that hogwash seriously. So out the door they went.This movie sounds like a fantasy, a delicious bit of soft-core anti-Trump porn. I quit smoking a long time ago, but if this movie is the story of a hard-core Trumper finding his hidden better, more kind side, I might have to lie on my back and smoke a cigarette.
It doesn’t have quite that catharsis because the Damon character is much more of the “I don’t like politics” type of Trump voter. Which is both probably kinda honest about the kind of seemingly nonpolitical people who were able to cast a ballot for this racist piece of garbage (even though the movie doesn’t even go so far as to have Damon be a “real” Trump voter), and also kind of convenient, because the movie then doesn’t have to deal directly with any of the racism stuff, even though one can easily imagine this character being racist, and he even does some stuff that have those overtones. It’s just far enough away from that turf that the movie isn’t really forced to confront it. More like the guy from your high school who was always nice to you and doesn’t post nonsense on Facebook but you kinda suspect that might have been where his sympathies wound up.
To be honest, my appetite for watching how people are in the real world is very weak right now. I don’t think I could sit through this movie. Recently I saw a bit on CBS Sunday Morning where Tom Brokaw rode a shuttle bus full of visitors to a Mayberry tourist site in South Carolina and asked the passengers questions about their beliefs. The weird statements that came out of their mouths bothered me for days afterward. It was like they had IVs in their heads pumping in concentrated right-wing propaganda. They think THEY’RE the good people, and the rest of us are the bad people, especially “the media”. One woman asked Tom Brokaw to not make them look like a bunch of backwards simpleton racists. But you are, Blanche, you are!
I thought it was really well done, even though it took about an hour for me to unclench from dreading an upcoming justification of the character being painted as “a MAGA-hole, sure, but a cuddly, lovable MAGA-hole” (which, in all fairness, never happens).
It should be said, however, that Jesse fuckin Plemons should be getting 3/4 of whatever Matty got paid.
B huh? I’ll give it a C. And Matt Damon and Abigail Breslin drug it down to that for me. Damon just seemed ready to bust out the automatic weapons a la Jason Bourne at any minute. Even the way he just walked from place to place, and Breslin was just a bitchy millenial, and I hate saying that as I am not some boomer who hates millenials and I don’t believe in most of the stereotypes. She hits all of them here, most evident her entitled attitude towards her father. I mean, he basically moved to France to help you out, and every time he visit, she shits on him. She’s even a bit of a c*nt to his new girlfriend and her adorable daughter.What saves this for me is Camille Cottin and Lilou Siauvaud. They compliment each other so well, and both of their performances are stellar. Okay, I’ll admit that I now have a huge crush on Camille Cottin, but truly, they are the real stars of this movie. I’d almost rather just see them do a mother and daughter living in France movie together. I’d even suffer subtitles for them.The plot is solid for the most part, but what I expected was more culture shock for an Oklahoman in France, and it just wasn’t there. He was pretty much accepted and able to function, even getting a job, which is almost unheard of for immigrants overseas. Him kidnapping the bad guy is just unbelievable and ultimately unresolved. In the end, I couldn’t care less about the two American characters, who seem to live off the good will of the French. How about that for a kicker. An American movie that makes the French the good guys?