A marvel, classic

Jason 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.