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Beneath the weathered baseball cap and bushy goatee, the parade of plaid shirts and the polite replies of “Yes, ma’am,” there’s a whole lot more to Bill Baker. Sure, he listens to old-school country in his pickup truck while driving between manual labor gigs and he never fails to pray before a meal, even if it’s tater tots and a cherry limeade from Sonic. It seems perfectly natural to him to keep a couple of guns in his run-down Oklahoma home, and he never misses an opportunity to watch his favorite college football team.

But there’s something simmering within this collection of red-state stereotypes, and “Stillwater” is at its best when it explores those complexities and contradictions. Beefed-up and sad-eyed, Matt Damon brings great subtlety and pathos to the role, especially when he cracks his stoic character open ever so gently and allows warmth, vulnerability, and even hope to shine through on his road to redemption. But Bill’s tale of hard-earned second chances is one of many stories director Tom McCarthy is telling in “Stillwater,” and while it’s the most compelling, it also gets swallowed up almost entirely during the film’s insane third act.

The script, which McCarthy co-wrote with Thomas Bidegain , Marcus Hinchey , and Noe Debre, loosely takes its inspiration from the case of Amanda Knox, the American college student convicted in 2007 of killing her roommate while studying abroad in Italy. Eight years later, Knox was acquitted. “Stillwater” moves the action to the French port city of Marseilles and introduces us to Bill’s daughter, Allison ( Abigail Breslin ), after she’s already served five years of a nine-year prison sentence for the murder of her lover, a young Muslim woman.

Allison insists she’s innocent; Bill resolutely believes her. And so “Stillwater” is also the story of a father and daughter trying to mend their strained relationship as he makes frequent visits to chat and do her laundry and she pretends to care as he prattles on about Oklahoma State football. (The college campus is in—that’s right—Stillwater, Bill and Allison’s hometown. But as you’ve probably guessed by now, the title refers to our hero’s demeanor, as well.) “Life is brutal,” each of them says at one point, and one of the more intriguing elements of “Stillwater” is the notion that being a screw-up is hereditary, which pushes against its feel-good, Hollywood-ending urges.

But wait, there’s more—so much more. Because the primary driving narrative here is the possibility that Allison can prove her innocence based on jailhouse hearsay about an elusive, young Arab man. Here, “Stillwater” becomes a procedural reminiscent of McCarthy’s Oscar best-picture winner “ Spotlight ,” as Bill knocks on doors and follows one lead after another, talking to people who either help him or don’t in his efforts to exonerate his only child. In this vein, it’s also about the racial tensions and socioeconomic disparities that exist in both France and the United States, and the blindly confident swagger with which some Americans carry themselves overseas—even someone like Bill who is, to borrow from the Tim McGraw song, humble and kind.

And for a big chunk of its midsection, it’s about a middle-aged man forming an unexpected friendship—and then a makeshift family—with a single mom and her little girl. Virginie (a vibrant and charismatic Camille Cottin ) and her daughter, Maya (an adorable and steely Lilou Siauvaud ), give the widowed Bill a shot at righting the wrongs of his past. Virginie and Bill initially connect when she offers to help him in his investigation by making calls, translating and generally serving as his guide through an ancient city he’s barely gotten to know. The relationship makes zero sense on paper—she’s a bohemian actress, he’s an oil-rig worker—but the small kindnesses they show each other allow them to forge a bond, and allow Bill to reveal more about himself and his tortured history, piece by piece. It sounds cheesy, but surprisingly, it works.

This is far and away the strongest section of “Stillwater,” and if the majority of this film had focused on this understated dynamic and the quiet hope of better days to come, it would have been more than satisfying. The performances here are lovely, and Damon enjoys distinctly sweet connections with both Cottin and Siauvaud. But then it takes a significant turn into darker territory toward the end, with twists predicated on major coincidences and reckless decisions. “Stillwater” also becomes a far less interesting film as it slogs through its overlong running time. While it’s fascinating to consider Bill’s self-destructive streak rearing its head once again, even after it seems he’s finally found some peace, the way it plays out is so wild and implausible, it feels like it was ripped from an entirely different movie and grafted on here. Within this eventful stretch, there’s also a suicide attempt that’s tossed in almost as a baffling afterthought, as it’s never mentioned again.

Ultimately, the cacophony of all these plot lines converging and the weight of the messaging being conveyed is almost too much to bear. Details get spelled out and characters explain their motivations when maintaining an overall air of mystery would have been far more effective. Whether or not Allison is guilty isn’t the point; enjoying a moment of stillness and solitude in the afternoon sunshine is, even if it's fleeting.

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Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Stillwater (2021)

Rated R for language.

140 minutes

Matt Damon as Bill Baker

Abigail Breslin as Allison

Camille Cottin as Virginie

Lilou Siauvaud as Maya

Deanna Dunagan as Sharon

Robert Peters as Pastor

Moussa Maaskri as Dirosa

• Tom McCarthy
• Thomas Bidegain
• Marcus Hinchey

Cinematographer

• Masanobu Takayanagi
• Tom McArdle
• Mychael Danna

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‘Stillwater’ Review: Matt Damon Gets to the Heart of How the World Sees Americans Right Now

'Spotlight' director Tom McCarthy collaborates with top French screenwriter Thomas Bidegain in this humbling Marseille-set crime drama.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

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Americans are used to watching Americans save the day in movies. That’s the kind of hero Bill Baker wants to be for his daughter Allison — a young woman convicted of murdering her girlfriend while studying abroad — in “Spotlight” director Tom McCarthy ’s not-at-all-conventional crime thriller “ Stillwater .” The setup will sound familiar to anyone who remembers the Amanda Knox case: Five clicks in to a nine-year sentence, Allison has always maintained her innocence. After new evidence arises, she writes a letter to her lawyer asking for help. But she’s careful not to involve her dad directly. “I cannot trust him with this. He’s not capable,” she writes.

To a particular kind of man, words like that are a direct challenge. And when that man is played by Matt Damon in sleeveless T-shirts and a bald-eagle tattoo, we expect him to save the day anyway. Maybe he does, but that’s not the reason McCarthy chose to tell this story. Originally, he just wanted to film a mystery in a Mediterranean town, deciding at some point that the French port of Marseille would do the trick. But in the time that it took to make the movie, something changed with America. Maybe you noticed. Certainly, the world did.

McCarthy tells “Stillwater” from Bill Baker’s point of view, but he invites audiences to see the character from others’ perspectives as well, to observe how this out-of-place roughneck looks to the people he meets abroad — and especially to a single mother named Virginie (“Call My Agent!” star Camille Cottin) whom the gruff widower befriends early on. Back home in Stillwater, Okla., Bill does odd jobs since losing his oil-rig gig. He wouldn’t be in Marseille if not for his daughter (Abigail Breslin). He’s not a tourist, and he’s not interested in learning the language. But he’s not the stereotypical “ugly American” either. Bill prays, he’s polite and he believes in doing the right thing. And if Allison says she’s innocent, then the right thing in this God-fearing, gun-owning guy’s eyes is to help her prove it.

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Now, anyone could’ve written that movie. But McCarthy was smart: He enlisted the top screenwriter working in France today, Thomas Bidegain (“A Prophet”), and his writing partner Noé Debré to collaborate and wound up with a completely different movie. Well, maybe not completely different, but different enough to disappoint those expecting to see Matt Damon whip out a gun and kick down some doors in pursuit of justice. (Let Mark Wahlberg make that film.)

Bidegain’s signature — the thing that sets him apart from the vast majority of screenwriters — is that he doesn’t write “the scene where” a specific plot point is supposed to happen. Watching most Hollywood thrillers, that’s all you get, as if the creators bought a bunch of index cards, divided the movie into story-advancing moments (the scene where A, the scene where B) and taped them to the wall, then built the script from that. Bidegain knows we’ve all seen enough movies that such literal-mindedness gets boring, and so he and Debré come at each scene sideways: They let certain things happen off screen, focusing instead on seemingly mundane snapshots that reveal far more about character.

“Stillwater” contains a mix of both approaches — a scene where a friend of Virginie’s asks Bill whom he voted for is a prime example — and while it’s hard to say who wrote what (Marcus Hinchey, of terrific Netflix drama “Come Sunday,” is also credited), the movie’s more interesting for being less obvious. Naturally, Bill wants to clear his daughter’s name, and “Stillwater” shows him going about it. But the cultural barriers make it impossible to get far by himself — a trip to north Marseille’s notorious Kallisté neighborhood leaves him hospitalized — and so he enlists Viriginie, winning her over by being kind to her 8-year-old daughter Maya (Lilou Siauvaud).

Of course, Bill can’t change French law, and it’s not clear that even if he could locate the guy Allison claims was responsible — an Arab who was there in the bar that night — he’d be able to overturn her conviction. But as he and Virginie spend time together, Bill shows Maya the kind of fatherly concern he was too drunk and reckless to give Allison when she was a kid. The guilt of that irresponsibility weighs heavy on Bill, adding another dimension to Damon’s remarkable performance. There’s something caveman-like about the way the actor carries his body, in the scowl on his face and slow drawl of his Southern accent. The character has a temper problem, and from the looks of him, he could tear someone in two — although that might not be advisable in a foreign country.

After hitting a dead end in the investigation, Bill decides to stay on in Marseille. He moves in with Virginie and Maya, picking up a few words of French and playing handyman around the house. To dub this Bill’s redemption might oversimplify things, although something’s plainly changing in him. And that change is the soul of “Stillwater.” Resisting any temptation to be cute, yet bolstered by child actor Siauvaud’s immensely sympathetic presence, the movie gives Bill — as well as audiences — a taste of another life.

Will Americans who haven’t been abroad connect with this part of the movie? Or will they be bored with every second that Bill isn’t proactively trying to prove Allison’s innocence? At 140 minutes, “Stillwater” spends a lot more time on Bill’s new domestic situation with Virginie and Maya than viewers probably expect. But then, these scenes take time, since they’re tasked with conveying more than just the latest development in the case. (By contrast, straightforward genre movies have the luxury of being tight.) Ironically, the clunkiest scene here occurs when the cops show up.

McCarthy has more on his mind, using Damon’s character to “make hole” (as roughnecks do) in various assumptions Americans hold about themselves. Bill serves as a mirror of what foreigners see when a certain kind of cowboy barrels through the saloon doors of another country, hands on his holster, and it’s not necessarily flattering. On the surface, that may not satisfy everyone, but then, to coin a phrase, “Stillwater” runs deep.

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition), July 8, 2021. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 140 MIN.

• Production: A Focus Features release of a Participant, DreamWorks Pictures presentation of a Slow Pony, Anonymous Content production, in association with 3Dot Prods., Supernatural Pictures. Producers: Steve Golin, Tom McCarthy, Jonathan King, Liza Chasin. Executive producers: Jeff Skoll, David Linde, Robert Kessel, Mari Jo Winkler-Ioffreda, Thomas Bidegain, Noé Debré. Co-producers: Raphaël Benoliel, Melissa Wells.
• Crew: Director: Tom McCarthy. Screenplay: Tom McCarthy & Marcus Hinchey, Thomas Bidegain & Noé Debré. Camera: Masanobu Takayanagi. Editor: Tom McArdle. Music: Mychael Danna.
• With: Matt Damon, Camille Cottin, Abigail Breslin, Lilou Siauvaud, Deanna Dunagan, Idir Azougli, Anne Le Ny.

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Matt Damon Makes For an Excellent Unlovable American in Stillwater

Bill Baker, the Oklahoma oil-rig roughneck abroad played by an excellent Matt Damon in Stillwater , is not a Trump voter, but you can understand why one of the women he meets in Marseilles asks him about it outright. It’s not just that he looks like a guy who might have voted for Trump, from his frustrated outburst about “fake news” and insistence of saying grace over every meal down to the particular style of wraparound sunglasses he favors. He embodies a certain instinctive obstinance, a habit of holding on to what he knows and only what he knows, no matter how much the world might change around him. While the people Bill meets in France tend to react as though they’re anticipating an ugly American, the truth is that Bill isn’t the kind of guy who’d go there at all, given a choice. He’s in Marseilles to see his daughter, Allison (Abigail Breslin), who’s in prison for killing her girlfriend, Lina, while there as an exchange student. It’s a crime she insists she’s innocent of, and, five years into her sentence, she’s come across a tenuous new lead she asks her father to pass along to her lawyer, though he ends up taking up the investigation himself.

Stillwater is the new movie from director Tom McCarthy, and it feels like one he’s spent his career preparing for — an enthralling, exasperating, and, above all else, ambitious affair that doesn’t soften or demand sympathy for its difficult main character but does insist on according him his full humanity. McCarthy is best known for 2015’s Spotlight , which won Best Picture, but most of his work as a director has been devoted to the idea of battling back first impressions to get at the complexity of individuals. Each of his early indies — The Station Agent , The Visitor , and Win Win — use a premise of almost-perverse hokiness as the basis for a subdued character study of enormous generosity. Stillwater is a sprawling realization of that same approach, teasing a tawdry international crime thriller and then offering, instead, a portrait of a man trying to make up for past regrets with one big swing and constantly frustrated by his inability to meet the standards he’s set for himself. Bill spends a good part of Stillwater looking for redemption, but the film is more interested in the idea of learning to live with your mistakes.

Bill’s relationship with Allison has been shaped by those mistakes, and we come to understand that she counts on him as her point of contact with the outside world without really trusting him. McCarthy started off as an actor, and he has a way of writing for great performances that seems counterintuitive at first because his movies are so averse to grandstanding or big monologues. But he approaches his characters like they’re iceberg tips, the bulk of their lives a submerged but solid presence that can be sensed, even if it’s mostly unseen. Details about Allison’s childhood and Bill’s drug- and drink-fueled absenteeism emerge slowly from both of them, and it’s clear that while Bill’s been showing up for her regularly, Allison wouldn’t be surprised if he stopped at any moment. He still thinks of a relationship as something that can be fixed rather than something that’s nurtured and maintained, and his eagerness to clear his daughter’s name (while lying to her about her attorney’s inaction) speaks to preference for the cleanness of action. For a while, his determination is effective, and Damon is particularly deft at showing how Bill’s doggedness works without giving the character’s efforts any fish-out-of-water cutesiness.

His blunt-force approach carries him forward until it doesn’t, and when Bill’s amateur detective work stalls out, the film takes a startling turn toward the domestic by way of Virginie ( Call My Agent! ’s Camille Cottin), a Parisian transplant who starts giving Bill translation help, and her ebullient daughter, Maya (the wonderful Lilou Siauvaud). Virginie is part of the local theater scene and has a touch of kamikaze do-gooderism that leads her to open her home to a relative stranger. Her Gallic bohemianism neither overlaps with nor lines up in opposition to Bill’s blue-collar stolidity. It’s her friend who asks if Bill voted for Trump and who’s briefly stymied by his response that he didn’t vote at all because his criminal record forbids it. If it’s never clear how much of a willing enlistee Bill is in his country’s ongoing culture war, the film is also aware of the fact that those schisms don’t export neatly. Bill, still scarred from the way Allison’s crime inflamed press attention because her lover was Arab and female, has no idea what to make of the way that a professor at her school casts her as a privileged American dating a poor girl from the inner city. But Allison didn’t grow up with money, Bill protests, and the man avers that she was nevertheless the one with power in the relationship and that “there is a lot of resentment toward the educational elite.”

Allison wanted to get far away from her father and from everything she knew, but one of the themes of the movie is that she’s more like Bill than she wants to admit. Stillwater can’t get away from its own origins either in the end, and after a delicate and lovely middle section in which the film liberates itself from any obligations to address the murder as something other than an intractable fact, it surrenders to obligations toward plot again. It’s a development that feels as inevitable as a visa expiring, with everyone having to take up the narrative that’s the ostensible reason the film exists, even if it feels artificial compared to what’s come before. At the start of Stillwater , Bill rides home from a post-storm cleanup job back in Oklahoma, and as two of his colleagues talk in subtitled Spanish, the audience is invited into a conversation Bill doesn’t understand. One man marvels at the fact that the destroyed houses are likely to be rebuilt just as they were. “I don’t think Americans like change,” the other observes, to which the first replies, “I don’t think a tornado cares what Americans think.” It’s a discussion that feels like it could apply to the movie they’re a part of, one that lays waste to expectations but ultimately can’t help but go back to the way things always are.

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Matt damon in tom mccarthy’s ‘stillwater’: film review | cannes 2021.

The star plays an Oklahoma oil worker who travels to Marseille to help Abigail Breslin as his imprisoned daughter in this cross-cultural drama.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Tom McCarthy cites Mediterranean noirs as the inspiration for Stillwater , but there’s little of that mystique in this uneven ‘90s throwback, despite the mostly untapped potential of its atmospheric setting in the French port city of Marseille. Matt Damon gives a solid performance as an unemployed Oklahoma oil rig worker with a messy past, determined to do right by the daughter stuck in prison for a murder she claims she didn’t commit. But that story is clunky, old-fashioned and predictable when it’s not implausible. In any case, it’s less involving than the shot at renewal the failed family man gets with a French single mother.

The latter role, Virginie, is played by Call My Agent! lead Camile Cottin in a quietly luminous performance, juggling French and English dialogue with the same relaxed warmth. As Damon’s Bill Baker grows closer to Virginie and her 9-year-old daughter Maya (Lilou Siauvaud, a charming natural), this reticent man who wears his disappointment like a heavy overcoat slowly opens up to the possibilities of a life he had thought off-limits. That thread taps into the same kind of sensitively observed cross-cultural connections McCarthy explored in The Visitor , which, along with The Station Agent , remains his most accomplished work as director — regardless of that best picture Oscar for Spotlight .

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Release date : Friday, July 30 Venue : Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition) Cast : Matt Damon, Abigail Breslin, Camille Cottin, Lilou Siauvaud, Idir Azougli, Deanna Dunagan, Anne Le Ny, Moussa Maaskri, Naidra Ayadi, Nassiriat Mohamed, Mahia Zrouki Director : Tom McCarthy Screenwriters : Tom McCarthy, Marcus Hinchey, Thomas Bidegain, Noé Debré

Unfortunately, the A plot keeps dragging the movie down. Following its out of competition premiere in Cannes , this late July Focus release looks likely to make only a brief theatrical detour en route to streaming platforms.

Scripted by McCarthy and Marcus Hinchey with French writers Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré, best known for their collaborations with Jacques Audiard, the screenplay’s earliest draft is from a decade ago and it does indeed play like something that’s been gathering dust in a drawer. There are allusions to current-day red-state America in the blinkered worldview that is part of Bill’s baggage, but that contemporary veneer is undernourished and the story’s political teeth have no bite.

Bill’s daughter Allison ( Abigail Breslin ) is five years into a nine-year sentence for the murder of Lina, the French Arab girlfriend she met while attending college in Marseille. Allison’s mother committed suicide for reasons never revealed, and the declining health of the maternal grandmother who raised her (Deanna Dunagan) means she can no longer travel. So Bill flies to Marseille as often as he can, delivering supplies, picking up her laundry and praying for Allison even though her affection for him seems muted. He was a screw-up before going into recovery for alcohol and drugs, but we only ever get generic hints about the reasons for her coolness toward him.

When Allison learns new information about Lina’s murder, implicating a young man named Akim from the projects, she asks her dad to deliver a letter to her lawyer Leparq (Anne Le Ny), requesting that she have the case reopened. But Leparq declines, pointing out that hearsay is not considered evidence. So while Bill keeps this from Allison, he makes it his mission to find Akim and prove his worth to his daughter. This despite her having made clear in her letter to the lawyer that she considers her father incapable and untrustworthy.

The language barrier and a lack of understanding of how the different social strata of Marseille work make his task a difficult one. But he gets help when he strikes up a friendship with theater actress Virginie, who has a habit of adopting causes.

Unfurling over a sluggish two hours plus, Stillwater is least convincing when McCarthy attempts to build suspense, with most of that work being done by Mychael Danna’s score. The late plot twists become almost risible, once Akim (Idir Azougli) enters the picture.

Part of the problem also is that there’s never much reason to invest in Allison, despite the heavy burden Bill clearly carries. Her case was big news at the time, and in a town where poverty and race draw sharp dividing lines, the sentiment of neither public nor press was much in favor of “the American lesbian.” Breslin has a few tender moments when she gets reacquainted with her father and his new adoptive family during a day release. But mostly, Allison remains remote as a character, especially when she blurts out heavy-handed lines like, “Life is brutal.” The fact that she might not be entirely blameless in Lina’s death should make her more interesting, not less.

Considering that Bidegain was a co-writer on Audiard’s great prison drama A Prophet , an enthralling representation of Muslim identity in a French microcosm, the race elements here are fairly basic. Liberal-minded Virginie bristles at the indiscriminate urge of many to put another Arab kid behind bars as they get closer to tracking down Akim, while for Bill, that kind of kneejerk racism is so familiar he barely notices it.

But those differences are also what makes the gradual transition from friendship to romance of Bill and Virginie so disarming. He’s a religious man who literally wears his patriotism on his sleeve in a bald eagle tattoo. He’s also the owner of not one but two guns, the idea of which Virginie finds incomprehensible. In one amusing scene, while her friend Nedjma (Naidra Ayadi) is helping them with some Instagram detective work, she asks Bill if he voted for Trump. He says only that he didn’t vote because of his arrest record.

Damon finds understated humor in this uncultured man who is nudged for the first time in his life to see himself — and by extension Allison — as the outsiders, the way the rest of the world sees Americans. A telling moment in an early scene finds him in the back of a van with a tornado cleanup crew chattering away in Spanish, while he sits in absent silence. His time in Marseille shows in subtle ways that he’s learning to see beyond otherness, and Damon never overplays that softening of Bill’s closed-off views.

The actor’s many scenes with young Siauvaud are quite lovely, avoiding cutesiness while gently showing Bill’s pleasure in getting to experience the kind of bonding he skipped with his own daughter. His awkward comments when Virginie invites him to watch a rehearsal of a play she’s doing show how completely he’s outside his comfort zone. (“What am I gonna do in a fuckin’ theater?” he asks Allison earlier, with blunt self-awareness.) But the melting of the distance between them is so well played by Damon and Cottin you keep wishing this was their story. A gorgeous interlude in which they dance to Sammi Smith’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” with Maya demanding to get in on the act, further cements that desire.

Bill may have stayed on in Marseille to remain in Allison’s life even after her rejection. But it’s the different version of himself he discovers there that provides the often clumsy Stillwater with some grace and heart.

Full credits

Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition) Cast: Matt Damon, Abigail Breslin, Camille Cottin, Lilou Siauvaud, Idir Azougli, Deanna Dunagan, Anne Le Ny, Moussa Maaskri, Naidra Ayadi, Nassiriat Mohamed, Mahia Zrouki Production companies: Participant, DreamWorks Pictures, Slow Pony, Anonymous Content, in association with 3Dot Productions, Supernatural Pictures Distribution: Focus Features Director: Tom McCarthy Screenwriters: Tom McCarthy, Marcus Hinchey, Thomas Bidegain, Noé Debré Producers: Steve Golin, Tom McCarthy, Jonathan King, Liza Chasin Executive producers: Jeff Skoll, David Linde, Robert Kessel, Mari Jo Winkler-Ioffreda, Thomas Bidegain, Noé Debré Director of photography: Masanobu Takayanagi Production designer: Philip Messina Costume designer: Karen Muller Serreau Music: Mychael Danna Editor: Tom McArdle Casting: Kerry Barden, Paul Schnee, Anne Fremiot

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Review: In ‘Stillwater,’ a red state hero roams chic France

This image released by Focus Features shows Matt Damon in a scene from “Stillwater.” (Jessica Forde/Focus Features via AP)

This image released by Focus Features shows Matt Damon, left, and Lilou Siauvaud in a scene from “Stillwater.” (Jessica Forde/Focus Features via AP)

This image released by Focus Features shows Camille Cottin, left, and Matt Damon in a scene from “Stillwater.” (Jessica Forde/Focus Features via AP)

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Early on in “Stillwater,” a gruff oil rig worker from Oklahoma is asked what he’s doing in the French port city of Marseille. “Visiting my daughter,” he replies.

That’s only sort of right, it turns out. He left some stuff out. But truth itself gets more than a little smeared in this fascinating film that’s really a character study pretending to be a thriller.

Matt Damon stars as the Oklahoman, a goateed, denim-wearing roughneck named Bill with a sad past. He’s visiting his daughter (Abigail Breslin) in France — that part is true. But it’s not like she’s studying abroad — she’s in prison for an Amanda Knox-like murder she insists she did not commit.

A potential break in the case unleashes Bill on the streets of the fading, cosmopolitan Marseille for the true killer. Except he’s no Jason Bourne or Liam Neeson: Bill clumsily bulldozes through a new culture, language and justice system, relying on Gallic kindness along the way. He is cringe-worthy. He is an American hero inverted.

Oscar-winning director Tom McCarthy — who co-wrote “Stillwater” with Marcus Hinchey, Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré — at first seems to be trafficking in notions of the Ugly American, that brash boor at the butt of Continental disdain.

“You sound very American right now,” Bill is told after failing to grasp that doing something both legally and ethically wrong to free his daughter might be a bad idea.

But “Stillwater” is after more than just caricature and, astonishingly, the movie abandons the hunt for the real killer for long stretches to focus on domestic tranquility. The tonal shifts might be too much for some viewers sucked in by a poster and trailer that dwell on the chase.

Damon’s character befriends a local single mother (played brilliantly by the French actress Camille Cottin, star of the Netflix series “Call My Agent”) and her 9-year-old daughter, Maya, played delightfully by Lilou Siauvaud. Together they pull him out of his cliché.

The girl teaches him French and does not recoil at his eagle-and-skull tattoo. She sees though his gruff exterior and offers him another chance at fatherhood, this time with a better outcome. She even converts him to soccer, a sport he initially called a game for “cry-babies.”

He finds a connection with her mother — both are single parents, after all — that soon has this roughneck attending the theater (he still insists on pronouncing it “thee-ay-ter”). The trio make a sweet, off-kilter family, but they are tested by the pull from Bill’s biological family, namely his daughter.

What lengths is he willing to go to free her? How far outside the law of a foreign country will he go? Will he pick the past over a makeshift new life? Or, as his daughter wails, is he just fated to mess everything up?

Bill is a hard part to pull off, but Damon does, creating a flawed but compassionate character, made doubly hard since he outwardly reveals little emotion. Damon plays him with a haunted sadness, unfailingly polite (“yes, ma’am”) and devout, honorable as long as you see things his way.

He is asked by the fascinated French if he owns guns and he does, two of ‘em. He is asked if he voted for Donald Trump and he couldn’t — felons can’t vote. It’s a cute side-step of the issue, but there’s zero chance he was a Hillary backer.

The way Bill walks — stiffly, unyielding, almost martial — sticks out on the streets of Marseille. He wears high-waisted work jeans, steel-toed boots and a dusty baseball cap, listening to country and eating hamburgers and at a Subway sandwich shop even in France.

Can he change? Can he find grace? Those are the questions that constantly pop up in this overly long but thoughtful work. It opens with Bill carpooling with fellow tornado cleanup workers who marvel at why Americans always return to the site of their home’s destruction to rebuild.

“I don’t think Americans like to change,” one says. The rest of the film is a test of that observation, using a rare red state hero in a foreign land forced to examine how the world sees him. And the result? It’s sometimes ugly, Americans.

“Stillwater,” a Focus Features release that arrives in theaters July 30, is rated R for language and some violence. Running time: 140 minutes. Three stars out of four.

MPAA definition of R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

Online: https://www.focusfeatures.com/stillwater

Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

‘Stillwater’ Review: A narrative that twists itself into knots

Tom mccarthy’s latest is more conceptually interesting than emotionally satisfying..

What to Watch Verdict

'Stillwater' avoids being a misfire by at least being interesting to parse, but don’t expect its ultimate purpose to resonate emotionally.

✖️ It's a twisty story with a lot on its mind, making it interesting to intellectually pick apart.

✖️ The supporting cast is putting in the work here.

✖️ The act breaks may be intentionally jarring, but they don't serve to keep one emotionally engaged.

✖️ Matt Damon is so restrained that his character can sometimes be impenetrable.

Whatever else can be said about Stillwater , it is not a film lacking in ambition or vision. Oscar-winning writer-director Tom McCarthy ( Spotlight ) and co-writers Marcus Hinchey and Thomas Bidegin have attempted to piece together a compelling piece of personal drama, at first smuggled in under the guise of an investigative procedural, but slowly collapsing inward to explore the intricacies of their protagonist’s motivations, compulsions, and needs. That’s a tall order, and the film succeeds well enough that you can clearly see what is being aimed for, at least in the broad strokes. However, Stillwater is also a film that intellectually engages more than it does emotionally, expecting too much from its audience in terms of patience and empathy.

The film’s trailer only truly showcases the film’s first act, in which Oklahoman Bill (Matt Damon) travels to Marseilles, France to visit his daughter Allison (Abigail Breslin), who has been imprisoned for the last five years for the murder of her college girlfriend. On this visit, Allison asks Bill to deliver a letter to her attorney, which states that a professor heard one of his students talking about a guy at a party who boasted about getting away with a similar-sounding murder. When Allison’s attorney (Anne Le Ny) refuses to follow up on this hearsay, Bill launches a makeshift investigation of his own, developing a bond with his hotel neighbor Virginie (Camille Cottin) and her nine-year-old daughter Maya (Lilou Siauvaud) as he receives Virginie’s assistance as a makeshift interpreter. In doing so, he hopes to not only get his daughter free, but to reignite a relationship that became strained and estranged long before Allison left for Europe.

The biggest issue right out the gate is that Bill is a hard character to read emotionally, which makes him a difficult protagonist to either root for or empathize with. This isn't so much a problem with Damon’s performance, which eventually does get enough of a leash to showcase more than solemnity, anger, and determination, but with how the character is written into the story. Though Breslin, Cottin, and Siauvaud are all delivering excellent performances, they have to do some heavy emotional lifting to make up for how little Damon’s character is allowed to display an internal life, at least throughout the first act. When the story is more procedural and the impetus for the storytelling is to explore the mystery rather than the protagonist, that’s not necessarily a problem, but so much storytelling economy is spent explaining how Bill has a history of being a fuck-up father that later turns in the story are short-changed by our inability to see that origin, either through literal events on screen or implication in Bill’s reactions.

This is why the first act break really throws the narrative pacing for a loop, as the investigation comes to a grinding halt and focus shifts to Bill’s attempts at domestic happiness. This is where Damon is allowed to shine, as Bill’s happiness slowly uncloisters and reveals dimension to a man who is not otherwise keen to show it. There’s a certain cleverness to the reversal, a satisfying acknowledgment that the catharsis of justice might not compare to the emotional stability of being at peace. Yet this act drags on for so long that the lack of plot momentum starts to become glaringly obvious, especially as the more compelling aspects of Allison’s claims of innocence are never allowed to drop entirely from the back of your mind.

This culminates in a third act that once again shifts tone and genre, this time to something that feels more exploitative than what preceded, a shift into melodrama that the film had otherwise restrained itself from. It’s a shockingly nihilistic turn for a film that was leaning so heavily into humanism for the bulk of its runtime, but there is value in that emotional bait and switch. Stillwater ’s climax and coda allow for plenty of literary interpretation about the ability and inability of people to change their ways and the inherent toxicity of certain American values, but at a sometimes tedious two hours and nineteen minutes, Stillwater feels more invested in painstakingly setting up its tragic inevitabilities than exploring what its events mean to the characters living them.

What’s most frustrating is that the individual scenes that comprise this overstuffed clutch of twists and motifs are mostly rather entertaining. Bill slowly coming out of his shell; The threads of Allison’s case coming together and falling apart; Virginie’s magnetic pull to a determined American’s love for his daughter: these all make for some funny, touching, and heartbreaking moments. It’s when taken as a whole that the film feels less substantial, that its compelling set-up and relaxed build-up was in service to some comparatively cheap pessimism when it could have leaned just as hard into its investment in hope and the sense of purpose Bill desperately craves. Stillwater avoids being a misfire by at least being interesting to parse, but don’t expect its ultimate purpose to resonate emotionally; it’s determined to force you to bounce off.

Stillwater opens in theaters on July 30, 2021.

Leigh Monson has been a professional film critic and writer for six years, with bylines at Birth.Movies.Death., SlashFilm and Polygon. Attorney by day, cinephile by night and delicious snack by mid-afternoon, Leigh loves queer cinema and deconstructing genre tropes. If you like insights into recent films and love stupid puns, you can follow them on Twitter.

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Review: Matt Damon is a man on a Marseille mission in the uneven but surprising ‘Stillwater’

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At the beginning of “Stillwater,” Bill Baker (Matt Damon), an Oklahoma construction worker, stands amid the remnants of a house that’s recently been destroyed by a tornado. He’s dependably good at his job, even if it’s just a temporary gig, something to tide him over while he looks for a more permanent position on an oil rig. Money and work have been scarce for a while, and the tornado, without affecting him directly, puts a cruel accent on the litany of disasters — alcoholism, unemployment, family estrangement, a criminal record — that his life has become. He’s gotten used to combing through the wreckage; when he leaves town a few beats later, it’s clear he’s not leaving behind much.

Although it draws its title from this Middle American city, most of Tom McCarthy’s methodical and surprising new drama takes place half a world away in the French port city of Marseille, where Bill finds himself on a curious and lonely assignment. He’s visiting his daughter, Allison (Abigail Breslin), who’s spent five years in prison for the murder of her girlfriend, Lena, whom she met while studying abroad in Marseille. The story was loosely inspired by events surrounding the 2007 killing of the British student Meredith Kercher, though McCarthy and his co-writers are not especially interested in a straightforward retelling of that tragedy.

Allison, the movie’s Amanda Knox figure, has always maintained her innocence. With four years left to serve, she asks her father to contact her attorney (Anne Le Ny) with new evidence that might persuade the authorities to reopen her case. A teenager, Akim, has allegedly implicated himself in a scrap of barroom hearsay, though it’s too flimsy a lead to persuade the attorney. But Bill, spying an opportunity to make up for his past negligence as a dad, stubbornly undertakes his own search for the elusive, possibly nonexistent Akim, all while navigating a city and a language that couldn’t feel more foreign.

To him, anyway. Centering its protagonist’s stern, bearded frown in nearly every scene, “Stillwater” registers Bill’s cultural confusion without necessarily indulging it. Unveiled this week at the Cannes Film Festival , a little further along France’s Mediterranean coast, the movie effectively merges the patient investigative rigor of McCarthy’s Oscar-winning newsroom drama “Spotlight” and the cross-cultural humanism of his earlier film “The Visitor.” Put another way, it’s a somber crime thriller wrapped around a sly fish-out-of-water comedy, in which Bill is invariably the butt of the joke.

“I’m a dumbass,” Bill says more than once, and the movie, however sympathetic to his plight, doesn’t really contradict him. Stiff of gait, clenched of jaw and plaid of shirt, Damon strides through the picture with a genial, determined cluelessness from which every lingering vestige of Jason Bourne has been carefully purged. Bill gets an A for effort, but the challenges of a murder investigation — tracing Instagram feeds, chasing down frightened witnesses — would prove daunting even to someone who knows the Marseille waterfront.

Fortunately, Bill meets a friendly bilingual guide in Virginie (a terrific Camille Cottin), a theater actress who regards this Sooner State refugee with kindness, amusement and an almost sociological fascination: Does he own a gun? Did he vote for Trump? (The answers are worth hearing for yourself.) Virginie also has a winsome young daughter, Maya (Lilou Siauvaud), who naturally hits it off with Bill immediately, raising the specter of a redemptive second shot at fatherhood. The mutually beneficial arrangement that follows — Virginie helps Bill with his search, Bill becomes her handyman and Maya’s babysitter — is one of those sentimental developments you grudgingly and then gladly accept, because the actors have such warm, involving chemistry and because there’s something irresistible about the kindness of strangers.

The best passages of “Stillwater” allow that kindness to flourish and take center frame, temporary liberating the movie from its dogged procedural template. McCarthy, a straightforward craftsman, has a gift for teasing out the humanity in every unshowy frame, and, working with cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi and editor Tom McArdle, he nicely conveys the passage of time and the blooming of fresh emotional possibilities. Those possibilities become still more heartrending when Allison is allowed out on parole for a day, in scenes that Breslin plays with a wrenching mix of toughness, resignation and despair. Through her eyes, we see the Marseille that she fell in love with and briefly wonder if her crucible of suffering might also mark a potential new beginning.

The filmmakers, of course, have chosen France’s oldest and most diverse city for a reason, given its longstanding reputation as a gritty hotbed of crime and poverty — a reputation that’s been partly fueled by the movies themselves, among them classic thrillers like “The French Connection” and “Army of Shadows” (and the recent “Transit,” a classic in the making). McCarthy has cited Marseille noir novels as an inspiration for his screenplay, which he wrote with Marcus Hinchey and the French writers Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré, who were doubtless crucial in fleshing out a persuasively inhabited street-level portrait of contemporary France. Notably, Bidegain and Debré have also fashioned “Stillwater” into a curious echo of their 2015 neo-western, “Les Cowboys,” another father-daughter rescue story set at a Franco-American cultural crossroads.

In “Les Cowboys,” a white man is driven mad by the realization that his daughter has run off with her Muslim boyfriend. Although it’s cut from different genre cloth, “Stillwater” doesn’t have to dig too deep to uncover similarly ugly sentiments in Marseille as Bill’s search for an Arab suspect brings him face to face with all manner of casual anti-immigrant bigotry. Bill, it’s worth noting, comes off rather better by comparison: He seems appreciably less racist than some of the locals, and if this devout Christian has any negative thoughts about his daughter’s passionate romance with an Arab woman, he keeps them to himself. His mission here isn’t motivated by religion, politics or ideology, but by the simple desire to bring his daughter home. Nothing could be more primal or understandable.

Our sympathetic identification with Bill, in other words, is the reason this movie exists. It’s also the reason a viewer might find “Stillwater” troubling as well as absorbing. This is the story, after all, of a white male American charging into a French Arab community (represented by fine actors including Moussa Maaskri, Nassiriat Mohamed and Idir Azougli) and running roughshod over cultural sensitivities in his aggressive pursuit of what he considers justice. It’s also ostensibly the story of a dead Arab woman who nonetheless remains at the narrative margins and who exists primarily as a catalyst for her lover’s incarceration and potential exoneration.

The standard defense against this criticism is that the filmmakers are smart and self-aware enough to have anticipated it. In this case they’ve also sought to defuse it by treating Bill’s narrative centrality as a point of subversion, a means of rejecting the trumped-up myth of American exceptionalism that he represents. Bill’s outsider status, a source of pathos and comedy in the first two acts, threatens to become a moral liability in the third. McCarthy pushes the thriller narrative in directions more extreme and harrowing than plausible, bringing Bill and Allison’s story to an unexpected point of reckoning. It’s possible to be genuinely moved by that reckoning — and to admire the obvious intelligence and care that have been brought to bear on “Stillwater” — without fully buying the trail of contrivances and compromises it leaves in its wake.

‘Stillwater’

(In English and French with English subtitles) Rating: R, for language Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes Playing: Opens July 30 in general release

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A father travels from Oklahoma to France to help his estranged daughter, who is in prison for a murder she claims she didn't commit. A father travels from Oklahoma to France to help his estranged daughter, who is in prison for a murder she claims she didn't commit. A father travels from Oklahoma to France to help his estranged daughter, who is in prison for a murder she claims she didn't commit.

• Tom McCarthy
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• Camille Cottin
• Abigail Breslin
• 543 User reviews
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• Trivia Tom McCarthy explained in an interview how he and Matt Damon immersed themselves in the culture of Oklahoma oil "roughnecks" for the film: "Matt and I started going to Oklahoma early on to get a taste of the place and the people and spending time with roughnecks, in particular. They really opened up their lives to us, and their worlds and their families. They were incredibly instrumental in helping us shape the story."
• Goofs When Allison jumps into the water, she is wearing a white panties. Seconds after when she is floating she is wearing a striped shorts.

[last lines]

Allison : [back home, sitting on the porch] Everything looks the same here. Nothings' changed. Don't you think?

Bill : No, Ally, I don't. It all looks different to me. I don't hardly recognize it any more.

• Connections Featured in OWV Updates: OWV Cinema Poster Update (18/12/2023) (2023)
• Soundtracks On the Road to Rock and Roll Written and Performed by Jimmy LaFave Published by Night Tribe Music Courtesy of Music Road Records and Night Tribe Music

User reviews 543

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• July 30, 2021 (United States)
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• $14,465,535
• Aug 1, 2021
• $19,754,272

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• Runtime 2 hours 19 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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Stillwater Review

06 Aug 2021

Perhaps surprisingly, Stillwater is not a straight-to-streaming film about a killer shark terrorising a sleepy fishing village or a faux rockumentary about Billy Crudup’s band in Almost Famous . Instead, Tom McCarthy ’s first foray into adult filmmaking since the Oscar-winning Spotlight delivers two films for the price of one. It starts as a tough-ish dad-on-a-mission movie, before morphing into a relationship drama and then back again. If it never completely integrates its genre choices, Stillwater is still the kind of mid-budget grown-up movie that Hollywood supposedly doesn’t make anymore. Originally planned for Awards season 2020 — instead it’s bowed at Cannes — it delivers a mostly entertaining, if overlong thriller-drama (thrama?).

The father-possessed aspect sees Matt Damon ’s Bill Baker, an oil driller from Stillwater, Oklahoma (the title has another significance), who crosses the pond to visit his daughter Allison ( Abigail Breslin ) in a Marseille prison. Charged with murdering her girlfriend Lina, Allison has run out of legal options and gives Bill a letter that may represent a way to re-examine the case. When Bill runs up against hardnosed French judges, he takes matters into his own hands, seeking out detectives and DNA tests, talking to witnesses and chasing down suspects. If it sounds like Liam Neeson territory, it’s played on a much more human scale — there are dead ends and realistic fist fights — and the plot points are filtered through the estranged (but not particularly gripping) relationship between Bill and Allison, played out in snatched prison visits.

The whole thing is solidly anchored by Matt Damon.

Bill is helped on his quest by theatre actor Virginie ( Call My Agent! breakout Camille Cottin) and, around halfway through, Stillwater shifts gear. At this point, McCarthy becomes much more interested in Bill finding a new lease of life with Virginie and her eight-year-old daughter, Maya (Lilou Siauvaud). There are interesting dynamics at play here as the God-fearing, gun-loving (a shotgun and a Glock) American tries to find common ground with a liberal French thesp (“What am I going to do in a fucking theatre?” Bill says at one point), Damon, Cottin (excellent) and young Siauvaud creating a warm, inviting chemistry that makes the potentially convenient relationship convincing.

Co-screenwriter Thomas Bidegain is a frequent collaborator of Jacques Audiard and Stillwater tries but doesn’t always succeed in channelling the French filmmaker’s mixture of character study and genre licks — the concentration on family drama dissipates the momentum of the investigation, and some of the thriller tropes feel a contrivance amidst well-observed, intimate moments. Still, McCarthy’s filmmaking is confident, the Marseille setting feels fresh, and the end goes to a different, interesting place. The whole thing is solidly anchored by Damon, who is believable as a taciturn man, dealing with regret over his existing relationships while tentatively forming new ones, discovering tenderness and a different way of living. Amidst the procedures and the punch-ups, he makes Stillwater worthwhile.

Stillwater review: "Matt Damon’s sturdy presence just about holds it together"

GamesRadar+ Verdict

A fish out of water makes waves across the pond in a compelling if credulity-testing drama shot on characterful location.

Why you can trust GamesRadar+ Our experts review games, movies and tech over countless hours, so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about our reviews policy.

Amanda Knox doesn’t have a story credit on Tom McCarthy’s latest, Stillwater. But it is clear from the off that her conviction, imprisonment and later exoneration for the murder of fellow student Meredith Kercher sowed the seeds for this brooding drama about an Oklahoma construction worker (Matt Damon) determined to prise his daughter (Abigail Breslin) from the Marseille prison she has spent the last five years in for ostensibly killing her girlfriend.

Damon’s Bill Baker isn’t rich, has no connections and can’t speak French. But he is tenacious, dogged and good with his fists, attributes that not only persuade actor Virginie (Camille Cottin) to take up his cause but also help him track down a mystery man who might hold the key to his daughter’s liberty. 

Spotlight director McCarthy skilfully cranks up the tension as Damon – beefier and craggier than he was in his Jason Bourne heyday – entangles both Virginie and her own daughter Maya (a scene-stealing Lilou Siauvaud) in his Taken-esque quest. Yet he also finds time for politics: co-writers Thomas Bidegain, Noé Debré and Marcus Hinchey make sure that Damon’s blue-collar hero carries some Trumpian baggage on his journey across the Atlantic.

It’s certainly hard not to think of The Donald as this obsessive dad tramples roughshod over local sensibilities, takes the law into his own hands and contemplates pinning the murder on a blameless immigrant. This, however, is merely a precursor to the kinder and wiser Bill we see gradually emerge – a corrective, clearly, to the erstwhile president’s divisive MAGA rhetoric.

Yet no sooner has Bill earned a place in Virginie’s home and heart with his Maya-minding skills and bathroom-fixing abilities (Basin Bourne?) than a gigantic coincidence occurs that puts Stillwater firmly back on to a thriller footing. The machinations that follow stretch the plot’s credibility to breaking point, testing the tolerance in a way that could prompt derisive sniggers from less forgiving viewers. Damon’s sturdy presence just about holds it together, while Breslin shows some impressive chops as the daughter who is too aware of his failings to see him as her saviour. By the end, though, the still waters McCarthy seeks to navigate don’t run deep so much as dry – a consequence, you suspect, of trying to cram too many genres into one star vehicle.

Stillwater was shown at Cannes Film Festival. The movie is out in US cinemas from July 30. In the meantime, check out the most exciting upcoming movies heading your way.

Neil Smith is a freelance film critic who has written for several publications, including Total Film. His bylines can be found at the BBC, Film 4 Independent, Uncut Magazine, SFX Magazine, Heat Magazine, Popcorn, and more. 

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Stillwater review: Tom McCarthy follows Best Picture-winning Spotlight with this empty gesture of a film

Despite being inspired by ‘the amanda knox saga’, the drama doesn’t reckon with the injustice she faced, article bookmarked.

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Dir: Tom McCarthy. Starring: Matt Damon , Camille Cottin and Abigail Breslin. 15, 140 mins.

Director Tom McCarthy has yet to respond to the tweets Amanda Knox posted last week about his film, Stillwater . We don’t know what he thinks of her accusations, laid out in a follow-up piece in The Atlantic , that his film profits off what she terms “my identity, and my trauma, without my consent”. Knox spent almost four years in an Italian prison after being wrongfully convicted of the 2007 murder of a fellow exchange student, Meredith Kercher – despite the fact that the man later found guilty, Rudy Guede, was already in police custody at the time after his bloodstained fingerprints were discovered at the scene. She was finally acquitted in 2015.

Knox may never hear from McCarthy. She’s just one infinitesimal part of Hollywood’s long history of siphoning from real-life pain, and he may not consider himself as having any moral obligation here. After all, he claims Stillwater was only “inspired” by her story. But, crucially, her doppelgänger in the film, Allison (Abigail Breslin) – here, imprisoned in France after being convicted of her girlfriend’s murder – is depicted in a way that seems to indirectly question Knox’s innocence. Art is not journalism. Storytellers deserve a certain amount of freedom to explore the moral and emotional underpinnings of recent history. McCarthy is certainly aware of that – his film Spotlight , which studiously documented the Boston Globe ’s investigation of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church, won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2015.

But artists also don’t get to pretend that they live in some bubble where their actions have no material effect on the world. It does matter what Stillwater has to say about Knox – and the cruellest part of it all is that McCarthy comes up empty. Stillwater is an empty gesture of a film. It doesn’t reckon with the injustice Knox faced. Nor does it sympathise with her time behind bars. She doesn’t even get to be the main character. That would be Matt Damon’s Bill Baker, Allison’s father – a completely fictional figure, with none of this family’s details matching up to Knox’s. He turns up looking like a Saturday Night Live skit’s impression of an American trucker, with his goatee and a tattoo of an eagle gripping a skull.

He’s an oil rig worker from Oklahoma who’s touched down in Marseilles to visit Allison in prison. Early on, we watch him as he strides down the hallways of his French Best Western hotel with his French Subway sandwich clenched in his fist. It’s like McCarthy and Damon are trying to goad their audience into laughing at Bill. He stands like a GI Joe doll, his limbs stiff and ready to pulverise any incoming threat. He talks like he’s chewing gravel, in low, monotone bursts. Allison doesn’t even seem to trust her father’s basic competency, since she uses him to pass on a note to her lawyer (Anne Le Ny) which contains information on a potential lead in her case (Idir Azougli’s Akim) and a request not to let her father know anything of it.

When he finds out anyway, Bill decides to hunt down Akim himself, with no real thought of what happens next. Since Bill doesn’t speak a lick of French, he ends up enlisting the help of bleeding-heart liberal Virginie (Camille Cottin, who brings a welcome effortlessness to the role). It’s here that McCarthy attempts to pull the rug from underneath his viewers, as Bill befriends Virginie and her adorable daughter (Lilou Siauvaud) – aha! Bill has layers beyond the blue-collar stereotype. But that won’t be a revelation to anyone who doesn’t possess a blinkered view of the world.

McCarthy, his co-writer Marcus Hinchey, and the two French writers they collaborated with – Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré – all seem to be tunnelling towards some grand statement about the impenetrable cultural divide between France and America. Virginie is a cultured actress; Bill can’t make heads or tails of the play she’s starring in. None of this feels particularly illuminating, and it’s made worse by the way Stillwater flattens and demonises the banlieue (France’s low-income housing projects) as a “no-go area”.

Bill is constantly told that, as an American, he could never possibly grasp the racial tensions in France – it’s a bizarre assertion. It seems Marseilles’s immigrant population, as with Knox herself, are treated as mere casualties in Stillwater ’s grand vision. If only that vision had some substance to it.

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Stillwater review – panda pleasures, with a side order of mindfulness

Apple TV+ has hit the jackpot with a new children’s animation that delivers wholesome morals via dreamy visuals

T he home-working parents of young children can develop an unusually involved relationship with their streaming services. To bestow co-parent status on an inanimate object may seem extreme – even if it does have Bluetooth 5.0 wireless technology – but it’s whatever gets you through the pandemic, right? And if we must park them in front of a glowing screen every once in a while, it’s good to know there’s something not only harmless but actively wholesome.

Apple TV+ came late to the streamer game, but they already know the playbook: lure subscribers in with starry prestige drama , then get them hooked via the pester-power of their offspring. This is presumably the thinking behind Stillwater, a high-end animated series that arrives just weeks after Doug Unplugs to further bolster the service’s programming for kids.

Siblings Karl (voiced by Judah Mackey), Addy (Eva Ariel Binder) and Michael (Tucker Chandler), experience the usual childhood frustrations and squabbles, but their path towards junior enlightenment is smoothed over by Stillwater (James Sie), the wise and endlessly patient Panda who lives next door. He has a warm chuckle and a suitable story for every occasion.

Where are their parents? Never seen and never asked after. As with CBeebies’ Bing, the childcare arrangements of this family don’t bear much scrutiny. Stillwater is always on hand, however, following in the part-zen master, part-child psychologist tradition of Big Bird and Mr Rogers .

When Karl complains that neither Addy nor Michael believe that his cardboard spaceship is capable of taking off, Stillwater tells the story of the farmer who built a tower to the sun, despite his neighbours’ naysaying. When Addy loses patience with her brother’s toy-hogging, Stillwater is reminded of “a monk I once knew, who asked a similar question about a scorpion”. Unlike real children, these guys never get bored and wander off to find the iPad. They stick around, not only for the story’s all-important moral, but also to talk through their feelings afterwards.

Stillwater’s earnest, encouraging style doesn’t leave much space for humour or silliness, but its calming tone is just right for the post-dinner, pre-bedtime crowd. The quality of animation is also well above average. As befits a show that essentially functions as a mindfulness app for the under-eights, each leaf and strand of hair is detailed enough to justify some moments of quiet contemplation. A shot in the first episode depicts two crisp autumn leaves in a rainwater stream with the kind of stunning CGI realism usually reserved for Pixar blockbusters.

Speaking of whom, it’s ironic that all Pixar’s movies are to now be found on rival service Disney+ despite the fact that Steve Jobs was so involved in the founding of that groundbreaking animation studio. Meanwhile Apple TV+ has a deal with rivals DreamWorks and Gaumont, but such is the complicated history of corporate mergers. Despite such inevitable comparisons, this series forges an aesthetic of its own by including animation-within-the-animation segments to illustrate Stillwater’s fables. These hark back to the 2D style of classic Disney, and feature talking animal protagonists in human costume and settings that are variously suggestive of ancient China, 19th-century Italy and 1950s Brazil.

It’s the hodgepodge of east Asian culture, filtered through suburban America, which best characterises Stillwater. The garden features a koi river and a cherry tree, the panda spends his spare time painting in the Japanese shodō style or practising tunes on his bamboo flute. This is true to the Zen Shorts stories, written and illustrated by Ohio-born Jon J Muth, on which the series is based.

Yet cultural appropriation can be an aesthetic issue as often as it is an ethical or economic one. Streaming services have, almost accidentally, become a smorgasbord of re-dubbed insights into foreign cultures, and Stillwater simply lacks the idiosyncratic charms of Mumbai-made Mighty Little Bheem on Netflix or the South Korean Pinkfong on YouTube.

Happily, it is possible to experience life’s minor disappointments without losing sight of the greater joys. No doubt Stillwater has a story about just that.

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Catholic Review

Inspiring the Archdiocese of Baltimore

Movie Review: ‘Stillwater’

NEW YORK (CNS) — Matt Damon plays a man in search of redemption and renewal in the bleak yet touching drama “Stillwater” (Focus).

Directed and co-written by Tom McCarthy, the film succeeds on a personal and cultural level, though its brief forays into overtly political territory are far feebler. Its ambiguous treatment of faith, together with other elements, marks it as fare for grown-ups.

Damon portrays Bill Baker, an unemployed and widowed oil-rig worker from the Oklahoma city of the title. Five years after his college-age daughter, Allison (Abigail Breslin), an exchange student, was imprisoned in Marseille for the murder of her lesbian lover, Lina — a crime of which she insists she is innocent — Bill relocates to the French port city to follow up a new lead in the case.

Stymied by the refusal of Allison’s lawyer, Maitre Leparq (Anne Le Ny), to pursue the fresh evidence, Bill is forced to investigate on his own. Yet he’s a fish out of water in his new surroundings, understanding neither the national language nor the local rules of behavior.

He turns for help to a chance acquaintance, stage actress Virginie (Camille Cottin), a single mother who, with her young daughter Maya (Lilou Siauvaud) in tow, is staying at the same hotel as Bill while waiting to move into a new apartment. The two strike up a friendship and, once Virginie and Maya get settled, Bill moves in with them.

Romance with Virginie looms as Bill, whom Allison regards as a failed father, seeks a second chance at successful parenthood through his nurturing of Maya. But his prospects for emotional fulfillment are threatened by the rashness with which he is willing to act to find the real culprit behind the killing.

The script, penned in partnership with Marcus Hinchey, Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré, is effective in examining the strained relationship between Bill and alienated Allison. It also captures the clash between the values of the American heartland Bill personifies and those of Europe, though its approach to this topic sometimes feels facile.

Along with his gun ownership, one of the aspects of Bill’s lifestyle that Virginie finds hard to fathom is his heartfelt, though nondenominational, piety. Thus, when he quietly insists on saying grace before eating, it feels like a faux pas to which she reacts with mildly amused bewilderment.

It’s also clear that Allison merely pretends to join in Bill’s prayers during his visits to her. Where viewers’ sympathies are meant to lie, however, is less apparent.

While Allison’s ongoing emotional tie to Lina is clearly established, murky circumstances prevent this from having much of a wider, real-world application. McCarthy and his fellow screenwriters take it for granted that the relationship was not, in itself, morally questionable — and adopt a similar stance toward the possibility of Bill and Virginie moving in together.

Yet the fatal outcome of Allison and Lina’s bond makes it obvious that it was a dangerously volatile one. As a result, the movie avoids sending any particular message about homosexuality as a general matter.

Flawed but affecting, “Stillwater” avoids caricature, though it doesn’t always steer clear of au courant sententiousness. Still, it’s a thoughtful production to which Damon brings a winning degree of understatement.

The film contains mature themes, including homosexuality and suicide, cohabitation, a premarital bedroom scene, a few mild oaths, frequent rough and crude language and some crass expressions. The Catholic News Service classification is A-III — adults. The Motion Picture Association rating is R — restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

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‘Young Woman and the Sea’ Review: Fighting Sexism and Rough Waters

Daisy Ridley plays Gertrude Ederle, who persuades her father to pay for swim lessons, and then goes on to be a pioneer.

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By Glenn Kenny

In a brassy set piece from the 1952 classic “Singin’ in the Rain,” its star, Gene Kelly, impersonates a newbie hoofer seeking fame on the Great White Way. “Gotta dance!” he exclaims to anyone he meets. In “Young Woman and the Sea,” Trudy Ederle is fond of singing the 1921 hit “Ain’t We Got Fun.” First loudly, with a ukulele, to convince her early-20th-century immigrant dad to spring for swimming lessons; later, softly, to herself as she prepares to become the first woman to swim across the English Channel . It’s her way of proclaiming “Gotta swim!”

The real-life Gertrude Ederle was so utterly compelled that she put her hearing, already damaged by a childhood bout with the measles, at serious risk with her immersions. Based on a biography by Glenn Stout that contains some pretty provocative and reasonably well-supported theories about the ups and downs of her career, this Disney movie runs with those theories hard. Ederle, played by Daisy Ridley, runs up against not just the garden variety sexism of her time, but some male sponsors and coaches who actively sabotage her sporting efforts.

This is one of those movies that proves, when they’ve got a mind to, they can still make them like they used to. Which is to say, its production values are top-notch, the cast uniformly competent or better (Ridley is particularly winning), and the filmmaking language — the director here is Joachim Ronning, whose last at bat with Disney was the 2019 critical misfire “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil” — is meticulously calculated to deliver a rousing climax and an appropriately heartwarming coda.

It’s also rather rich in cliché. When Trudy is tempted to give up her sport, three angelic little girls show up as if on cue and one tells her, “It’s because of you I was allowed to swim.”

Young Woman and the Sea Rated PG for intense swimming maybe. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. In theaters.

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