J
ason Bourne in a contractor’s
ballcap in France and the plot squib of Stillwater
(2021) primed MP for a Taken
clone to avoid when
the film came out last year.
We could not have been more
mistaken. This thoughtful, understated piece adds an international
dimension to the body of work by Tom McCarthy, best known for
directing and co-writing the Academy Award-acclaimed Spotlight
(2015) about The Boston Globe breaking the story of pedophile Roman
Catholic priests.
Often in McCarthy’s stories,
damaged, isolated characters discover resonances in others outwardly
different or estranged from them. The
characters’ damage and isolation arise less from specific traumas
than patterns worn from living their lives. They
do this memorably in The
Station Agent
(2003), The Visitor
(2007), Win
Win
(2011), and here in
Stillwater.
The films work well because their outwardly mismatched casts, here
led by Matt Damon, Abigail Breslin, and Camille Cottin (of Call
My Agent!/Dix pour cent 2015-20),
gel as ensembles to produce a satisfying range of tones which
complete an
idea of something believable.
|
No one figured Bill Baker (Damon) to amount to much, especially not himself, in Tom McCarthy’s Stillwater
(2021).
|
Bill Baker (Damon) is less
than a Midwestern Everyman. A high-school dropout, he never did much
with his life but “make holes” as an Oklahoma oilfield roughneck.
Nor did anyone expect him to, starting with himself, “working oil
rigs, being a fuck-up when I wasn’t.” After his wife killed
herself young, his mother-in-law Sharon (Deanna Dunagan) took over
raising his daughter. Bill drank and did prison time for assault. He
stopped drinking and found Jesus where he left him. Laid off from his
oil rig job, he works “construction” as a day laborer with recent
immigrants clearing tornado-devastated houses. |
Straight-talking, no-nonsense
“Gram” Sharon
(Deanna Dunagan) took over raising Bill’s
daughter Allison after his wife’s suicide.
|
Bill’s daughter Allison, a
student at Oklahoma State University in hometown Stillwater, got into
a study-abroad program at Aix-Marseille University in France, “far
away and completely different”
from home. However, an affair with a French Algerian woman student
soured. Allison’s live-in lover was murdered. Allison, convicted
for the crime, got a nine-year sentence. Straight-talking,
no-nonsense “Gram”
Sharon handled the French lawyer and the money. She attended
Allison’s trial in
Marseille and visited
her in prison until her health made it difficult and Bill took over. |
Bill (Matt Damon) visits his
daughter Allison (Abigail Breslin) in prison in Marseille in
Stillwater (2021).
|
We first meet Ally (Breslin)
when Bill visits her in Marseille five years into her sentence. Ally
is happy to see a familiar face she can trust, though mainly relieved
that “Dad” will take a letter to her lawyer. The letter is
written in French: Bill cannot read it. He and his daughter are not
close. For Bill, a two-week trip to Marseille to visit Ally could
just as well be to a remote prison in the US or anywhere. It’s a
duty. He brings Gram’s gifts and does a load of laundry. Bill
prefers Subway to bouillabaisse: he does his duty, gets by with the
French, goes home when it’s over. He takes the letter to Ally’s
lawyer Maître
Leparq (Anne Le Ny). |
For Bill (Matt Damon) a
two-week trip to Marseille to visit his daughter is a duty that might as well be to a remote prison somewhere in the US.
|
In a sense, Bill is like an
American GI of the so-called Greatest Generation, or how Americans
now like to think of them, whom Europeans met during the war: naïve,
but a bit older. Like the GIs, Bill knows practically
nothing of the world
outside his hometown; he
accepts that life elsewhere is different. He and the GIs share the
saving grace of recognizing that people are people wherever they go,
despite looks, language, or politics: rather than worry about what
they don’t get, they touch similarities. As such, the film’s
focus remains on individual characters without political or “culture
war” comment. Bill knows
“acceptance”: he takes
people in his steady
gaze at face value and
gets along fine with most of those he meets, especially children. |
Bill (Matt Damon), who takes
people at face value, meets Maya (Lilou Siauvaud) and through her
finds a helper in her mother Virginie.
|
Through a small child, Maya
(Lilou Siauvaud), Bill finds an ostensibly unlikely helper in her
mother Virginie (Cottin), a younger almost-hip French theatre actress and
single mother. Bill extends his stay in Marseille. Ally’s letter to
her lawyer, along with Maya and Virginie’s entrance into the story,
organize a collection of possibilities which comfortably hold a
viewer’s interest for the film’s slightly longer than two-hour
running time. |
Bill (Matt Damon) follows a
lead to clear his daughter Allison of a murder conviction
with the help of Virginie (Camille Cottin).
|
In addition to soft-pedaling
politics and culture war,
Stillwater
is notable for entering the French world with an open eye and ear.
Half the four-man writing team is French. The film gets authentic
context watching and listening to the French eat and talk, whether
among cops in a Vietnamese restaurant, a group of friends dining on a
terrace, or Virginie and her friends at home. Another part of
the story shown rather than told is Marseille’s unique character as
an ancient port city, perhaps not unlike New Orleans in the US. |
Eating
and talking: Stillwater
(2021) is
notable in
that it enters
the French world with an open eye and ear, watching
and listening
to the French do two
things they like best.
|
Life
portrayed in Stillwater
may
be
only as brutal as it needs to be. Bill
Baker dressed in plainness and an oil rig contractor’s ballcap in
France summons his best to find a way to get his daughter out of a
foreign prison and in doing so finds himself. Stillwater
2021 U.S. (139 minutes) Participant/Dreamworks/Focus Features.
Directed by Tom McCarthy; written by McCarthy, Marcus Hinchey, Thomas
Bidegain and Noé
Debré;
music by Mychael Danna; cinematography by Masanobu Takayanagi;
editing by Tom McArdle; casting by Kerry Barden, Anne Fremiot, Paul
Schnee; production design by Philip Messina; produced by McCarthy,
Liza Chasin, Steve Golin, Jonathan King.