Stillwater

Tom McCarthy’s first stumble in a career of writing and directing terrific thought-provoking entertainments [The Station Agent (2003), The Visitor (2007), Win Win (2011), and the Oscar-winning Spotlight (2015)] is still a pretty damn solid movie up until its frustrating final act. Stillwater stars Matt Damon as unemployed Oklahoma oil-rig worker Bill Baker who travels to France to visit his daughter Allison (Abigail Breslin).  She’s in the middle of serving a nine-year prison sentence for killing her roommate and unfaithful lover while attending university in Marseille. Bill is determined to help his daughter prove her innocence, but Allison doesn’t think much of her roughneck dad’s ability to comprehend the situation enough to be of any use.  

Bill meets a French woman named Virginie (Camille Cottin) and enlists her help in tracking down leads Allison’s lawyers never followed up on. He eventually moves in with Virginie and her daughter (Lilou Siauvaud) and an unlikely, yet thoroughly believable, platonic and familial bond forms between them. With Virginie’s help, Bill follows one lead after another in an attempt to exonerate Alison. His quest leads to interactions with immigrants and French natives that enable the film to astutely explore the racial tensions and socioeconomic disparities in both France and the United States. The Southern-born Bill is polite and reserved, but he still possesses a distinctly American swagger of unearned confidence.

Though clearly inspired by the true story of Amanda Knox, the American exchange student wrongly convicted in 2007 of killing her roommate while studying in Italy, Stillwater is not some shallow ripped-from-the-headlines docudrama. McCarthy, as always, is far more interested in using fiction to explore contemporary political situations and character dynamics than in making the kind of quickie, highbrow, real-life exposés that get cranked out for premium cable networks. This is the story of a brash and not especially bright guy looking for a second chance who gets in over his head because he’s convinced his actions are serving a righteous cause. In that sense, Bill Baker may be intended as a metaphor for America itself. 

Like The Visitor, Stillwater takes on contemporary, hot button issues and humanizes them with thoughtful, authentic characters we come to care deeply about. It honestly and perceptively explores the flawed ways people try to reconcile their guilt and grief, and the love story that slowly develops at the film’s center is convincing and touching. But McCarthy and his cowriters Marcus Hinchey, Thomas Bidegain, and Noé Debré fail to craft the thriller elements of their story in such a way as to make credible the events that come at the end. The motivations and actions of characters that have been so beautifully set up and lived-in become inconceivably outrageous in the final half-hour. Major story elements occur off-screen, narrative twists are predicated on absurd coincidences, and key questions are left unanswered. 

It’s really too bad that McCarthy’s insightful takedown of American exceptionalism devolves into such a cliché-ridden, badly constructed police procedural. Up until that turn, Stillwater engages, stimulates, and charms in much the same way as his masterful previous pictures. Damon, Cottin, and Siauvaud give first-rate performances, and the Marseille locations provide a terrific setting. As a character study, this is an excellent movie. But it tries to be much more, which ends up diminishing the very thing it succeeds so well at.