christian movie review stillwater

"Too Slow, Overlong, Shallow, Foul-Mouthed, and Woke"

What You Need To Know:

Miscellaneous Immorality: Strong miscellaneous immorality not totally resolved includes kidnapping, man holds another man hostage while waiting for a DNA test related to a homicide scene, and lying.

More Detail:

STILLWATER is a character study laced with a leftist political slant and suspense thriller formulas about an unemployed oil worker from Oklahoma who travels to Marseilles, France to help his young adult daughter, who’s been in prison for five years for the murder of her lesbian lover, which she claims she didn’t commit. STILLWATER features some good acting and positive elements, but it’s overlong, poorly paced, slow, and jumbled, with lots of strong foul language, a brief bedroom scene, homosexual references, and a sly but shallow, false, slanderous, and offensive leftist narrative against America and against white people.

The movie begins by introducing Bill Baker, a laid-off construction worker in Stillwater, Okla., working part-time to clear debris from a recent tornado and having a job interview. It also introduces his mother, who’s sickly and stuck to an oxygen tank. In addition to being hard-working, Bill is a praying man who believes in Jesus Christ. Suddenly, Bill packs his bags, flies to Marseilles and checks in at a hotel. In the hallway, he meets an 8-year-old French girl named Maya.

Slowly, the movie reveals that, because his mother is sickly, it’s now up to Bill to visit his estranged daughter, Allison, who’s stuck in a hot Marseilles prison for murdering her lesbian French lover, Lina. Alison claims she’s innocent, however, and gives Bill a letter, written in French, to hand personally to her female lawyer. Bill gives the letter to the lawyer, who says the letter claims that a French professor ran into a girl at a party who told him she met a young Frenchman of Arab descent named Akim who told her he stabbed a girl five years ago. All along, Allison has said that a young man named Akim stole her purse and probably is the one who used her apartment key in the purse to break into the apartment and ended up stabbing Allison’s lover. The lawyer says she can’t investigate a claim that’s based on hearsay. She advises Bill not to give his daughter false hope.

When he returns to the prison to visit Allison, Bill lies to her and says that the lawyer has agreed to investigate the new information. Using help from the young girl Maya’s mother, who is an actress named Virginie, Bill starts to investigate the information on his own. With her help, he finds the girl who talked to the professor, but she’s too scared to help, because Akim lives in a dangerous Arab, Muslim section in town, in one of those large housing projects built by the French government. Maya’s mother helps Bill look up the girl’s social media accounts. On one of them, they find photos from the other party where the girl said she talked to Akim.

Bill shows the photos to Allison, and she locates a photo of Akim, a light skinned Arab with shoulder-length curly hair and soccer/baseball cap. So, Bill takes the photo and starts asking people in and around the housing project if they’ve seen the man in the photo. No one recognizes the photo until Bill runs into a group of thugs in a concrete area next to the housing project. They start harassing him and it ends up in a fight. The young men soon are kicking Bill as he lays on the ground. At that moment, Akim shows up, riding a motorcycle, and the young men asks him why the white American guy has his photo. Of course, Akim gets spooked, and he rides away on his motorcycle. The thugs dump an unconscious Bill at a deserted gas station.

The next time Bill shows up at the prison to visit Allison, he’s still got wounds from the fight with the young thugs. Bill confesses to Allison what happened, including the fact that her lawyer didn’t really want to investigate the new information in her letter. She becomes incredibly irate because, now, Akim will be harder to find than ever. So, she cuts off all ties with her father.

Four months later, however, Bill is still in Marseilles. He’s got a part-time construction job and is living with Virginie and Maya, sleeping on a futon couch. As part of a bargain with Virginie, he helps pay the rent, fixes things around the apartment and picks up Maya from school while Virginie rehearses a play with a local theater group.

As Bill’s relationship with these two people grows, information about Bill and Virginie’s past are revealed. Also, several questions arise. Will Bill and Virginie become lovers? Will Allison forgive her father? Will Bill locate Akim again and bring him to justice so he can free his daughter from prison?

As noted above, STILLWATER is partly a character study, partly a suspense thriller and partly a leftist political drama. The movie’s best parts are the funny, touching and simple dramatic scenes between Bill the laconic but hard-working Christian man, Maya and Maya’s compassionate mother. They help transform Bill into a more sociable, more likeable and less guarded man. However, there’s a dark side to Bill and his past. Eventually, for example, the movie reveals that, in his younger years, Bill had an alcohol problem and became a petty criminal after Allison’s mother died when she was young. Thus, over the years, Bill and Allison became estranged. The movie also reveals Maya’s father doesn’t live in Marseilles, and Maya was just the result of a fling her mother had. Also, in one sequence, Allison gets a one-day furlough from prison, and Bill takes her with him to have dinner with Maya and her mother. Allison is impressed with her father’s apparent newfound maturity, but she warns Maya’s mother in a private moment that her father is an unreliable person. Sadly, Allison’s advice turns out to be correct, but it also turns out that Allison isn’t telling the whole truth about what happened with Akim. This is where the movie’s suspense thriller qualities come to the foreground.

Interspersed with these two aspects is a leftwing political story. For example, taken as a whole, Bill’s story in STILLWATER is a story of how a troubled working class guy from the conservative state of Oklahoma becomes alienated from his conservative roots. At the end of the movie, when a chastened Bill returns home to Oklahoma, he tells his daughter he no longer recognizes his place of origin. At other points in the movie, comments are made about the white “racists” in France who don’t like the Arabs and Muslims who’ve emigrated to their country. For example, when Bill and Virginie interview a white bar owner about the social media photos, before Allison identifies Akim, Virginie becomes offended by the man’s “racist” comments about Arabs. The man says he’d be happy to identify any of the young men in the photo as Akim, because all the Arabs are despicable people and should be in jail. Hearing the man’s comments, she walks away and tells Bill she refuses to talk to the “racist” man anymore. Bill tells her she shouldn’t get so upset, adding that he runs into such people all the time in Oklahoma. Thus, the movie leaves viewers with the impression that average white people in Oklahoma and average white people in France tend to be stupid racists. Of course, white actresses like Virginie are more “sophisticated” and “enlightened,” or “woke,” and they side with non-white immigrants in France and America. In another scene, all of Virginie’s friends wrongly suppose that Bill voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but Bill sets them straight. He tells them he couldn’t vote at all because he’s an ex-felon and ex-felons can’t vote in most states in America, including Oklahoma. Turning the white guy from conservative Oklahoma into an ex-felon seems like leftwing overkill. On the plus side, the movie doesn’t seem to be attacking Bill’s faith in Jesus Christ.

Ultimately, the three strands described above turn STILLWATER into an overlong (the movie clocks in at 140 minutes), slow and sometimes artsy melodrama. Also, some of the movie’s plot points and dialogue don’t make sense or are pretty ignorant. For instance, at one point, Bill surprises Virginie’s friends when he tells them he owns not one but two guns back home, a shotgun and a Glock handgun. Don’t the filmmakers know that, just as ex-felons can’t vote in Oklahoma, they also can’t own guns? Also, [SPOILER ALERT] Allison eventually admits she was involved in Akim’s decision to break into their apartment. She tells her father, however, that she certainly never meant for Lina to be killed. This development doesn’t make sense. If she was involved, wouldn’t Akim spill the beans if the police find him and arrest him? Furthermore, what’s to stop him from lying to the police and telling them that Allison put him up to the whole thing? Another thing that detracts from this development’s credibility is a line in the movie which says that nothing was stolen from the apartment in question, a fact that led the police and the jury or judge to believe that Allison was guilty of her lesbian lover’s homicide.

Ironically, the lesbian, homosexual subplots in STILLWATER actually don’t seem to help the leftist case for acceptance and celebration of LGBT lifestyles. In the movie’s story, there are two lesbian lovers, but one of them is described as promiscuous and cheats on the other woman. Even so, the other woman is still grieving the death of her lesbian lover, despite feeling that her dead lover took advantage of her and humiliated her. Thus, one of the lesbian lovers sounds like a despicable person, and the other one seems like a gullible fool. How is that a positive portrayal?

Ultimately, therefore, the divided narrative focus in STILLWATER undermines some good acting and messes up the movie’s pacing. The movie’s suspense aspects also need some work. They’re not as compelling as they should be. In addition, the movie’s political narrative is typically politically correct, superficial, leftist, anti-American nonsense. It proves that the filmmakers and the actors don’t really understand America, politics and culture like they probably think they do. Finally, STILLWATER contains lots of strong foul language and a brief bedroom scene between an unmarried man and woman. The movie’s most redemptive elements are Bill’s loving relationship with the cute little girl, his commitment to his daughter’s welfare, his work ethic, and his belief in Jesus. However, MOVIEGUIDE® finds STILLWATER to be excessive and unacceptable overall as well as overlong, poorly paced, jumbled, and politically superficial. Although the movie doesn’t seem to attack Bill’s Christian faith, his faith also doesn’t seem to be much more than a commitment to pray to Jesus. He prays to Jesus before every meal, sometimes with other people in France. He also prays with his daughter in two scenes and is shown praying with her behind a glass. As a result, Bill’s Christian faith comes off as a minor, though overt, device in the movie’s attempt to present a character study of a working class person from a conservative “red state” in America. It could be said, however, that Bill’s more positive characteristics are related to his prayer life. For example, although Bill lies two or three times, eventually sleeps with Maya’s mother, and ends up doing a bad thing in the movie, he’s very kind and loving to Maya, he has a shy humility, he wants to do the right thing for his daughter, he’s clearly not a white racist like the French bar owner in the movie, and he can be very compassionate. So, although STILLWATER has some strong political and moral problems, it’s not abhorrent. It’s just a bit too woke and slanderous. Also, if Bill were truly committed to Jesus, wouldn’t he propose marriage to Maya’s mother before sleeping with her? His growing relationship with her and Maya would seem to demand it, if the filmmakers were truly interested in making a serious, accurate movie about a redeemed Christian father from Oklahoma unexpectedly finding himself falling for a pretty Frenchwoman with a lovable daughter. Back to the drawing board, people!

By the way, STILLWATER is loosely based on the wrongful murder conviction of American Amanda Knox in Italy. Knox, however, has condemned the movie for allegedly trying to make a profit from her wrongful conviction and for allegedly distorting the facts in her case. “By fictionalizing away my innocence, my total lack of involvement, by erasing the role of the authorities in my wrongful conviction,” Knox said, “[Director] McCarthy reinforces an image of me as a guilty and untrustworthy person” – see Amanda Knox blasts Matt Damon flick ‘Stillwater,’ claims it’s cashing in on her wrongful conviction | Fox News.

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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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• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 3 Reviews
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Common Sense Media Review

Excellent, character-driven crime drama; violence, language.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Stillwater is a drama about an Oklahoma man named Bill Baker (Matt Damon) who travels to Marseille, France, to help his daughter (Abigail Breslin) get out of prison. A group of men beats Bill up, punching and kicking him, with bloody wounds shown. Bill shoulder-slams another…

Why Age 15+?

Very strong language, with uses of "f--k," "s--t," "dumbass," "damn," "hell," "s

Main character is beat up by a gang -- punched, kicked. Bloody wounds shown. Mai

Woman swims topless; her breasts are semi-visible under the water and from the s

Cigarette smoking. Main character lives a sober lifestyle; several references to

Instagram is part of the story.

Any Positive Content?

Movie is mainly about making hard choices to help one person at others' expense.

Bill Baker faces danger and difficult odds to free his daughter from prison; he

Very strong language, with uses of "f--k," "s--t," "dumbass," "damn," "hell," "scumbags." Racist dialogue includes "look at all these monkeys," "they all look alike," etc.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

Main character is beat up by a gang -- punched, kicked. Bloody wounds shown. Main character shoulder-slams another character, punches him hard in the face, knocks him out. Character attempts suicide by hanging (off-screen); shown in hospital. Another reference to suicide. Reference to punching someone.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Woman swims topless; her breasts are semi-visible under the water and from the side. Kissing, foreplay. Woman in bra and underwear.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Cigarette smoking. Main character lives a sober lifestyle; several references to his earlier alcohol dependency.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Positive messages.

Movie is mainly about making hard choices to help one person at others' expense. The choice comes at a high price, and the price is paid, but the movie indicates that there was no other course of action for these characters; they would have made the same choices again.

Positive Role Models

Bill Baker faces danger and difficult odds to free his daughter from prison; he stops at nothing in pursuit of his goal, even sacrificing his own happiness and possibly his own freedom. At the same time, he offers a portrait of the most stubborn, bullheaded, and marginally rude qualities drawn from stereotypes about people from the United States. He's sometimes kind and helpful, but other times he makes poor choices and acts brashly. In a smaller role, Virginie is extremely helpful to a man she barely knows, offering to translate, drive him around, etc. Supporting characters make racist remarks.

Parents need to know that Stillwater is a drama about an Oklahoma man named Bill Baker ( Matt Damon ) who travels to Marseille, France, to help his daughter ( Abigail Breslin ) get out of prison. A group of men beats Bill up, punching and kicking him, with bloody wounds shown. Bill shoulder-slams another character and punches him hard in the face, knocking him out. A character attempts suicide, and suicide is discussed. A woman swims topless, with a breast semi-visible in an underwater shot. Characters kiss and undress each other; a woman is seen in her underwear. Language is quite strong, with frequent uses of "f--k," "s--t," and other words; supporting characters also make racist remarks. People smoke cigarettes, and Bill is said to be sober, having once had an alcohol dependency. Loosely inspired by the true story of Amanda Knox, this is a meticulous, detailed, slow-burn movie that goes much deeper than its plot synopsis suggests; it's dark, but quite thoughtful and powerful. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (3)
• Kids say (3)

Based on 3 parent reviews

A slow burn character driven film

What's the story.

In STILLWATER, Bill Baker ( Matt Damon ) is an oil worker in Stillwater, Oklahoma. He prepares for a trip, the latest of many, to Marseille, France, to visit his daughter, Allison ( Abigail Breslin ). Allison has been in prison for five years after being found guilty of murdering her roommate, but she has always maintained her innocence -- and now she has an idea who the real killer could have been. She asks Bill to deliver a letter to her lawyer, but the lawyer immediately shuts down the idea. In his hotel, Bill befriends a local woman, Virginie ( Camille Cottin ), and her 9-year-old daughter, Maya (Lilou Siauvaud). Unable to afford a private investigator, Bill decides to stay and hunt for the killer himself, with Virginie's help. He starts staying at her place -- and to become a father figure for Maya. Time passes, and then the killer shows his face.

Is It Any Good?

Like director Tom McCarthy 's best movies, this slow-burn neo-noir unfolds as a detailed, nuanced character study, with no detail too small and plot twists layered expertly into the tapestry. A plot synopsis or a trailer can't do justice to the impressive way that Stillwater plays out, with McCarthy ( The Station Agent , Spotlight , etc.) making full use of the film's 140-minute running time to dig deep into human emotions and hard choices. One of the key scenes -- Bill spotting the killer at a crowded soccer match -- comes at a moment after the movie has lulled us into a sense of comfort. Consequently, the discovery comes as a jaw-dropping shock rather than a routine twist.

In the midst of the storytelling, Stillwater deals with outsiders' presence in places that are foreign to them and the way that they can be viewed through lenses of hate, suspicion, or mistrust. Bill is portrayed as a bullheaded, pushy American, with sunglasses parked over his grim face or perched on top of his dirty baseball cap. (Damon gives an impeccable, immersive performance.) He shoves his way into situations, demanding to know whether anyone speaks English, unafraid -- or unaware -- of being rude. His slow transformation into someone who cares about others feels genuine, even though it can't fix his ultimate character flaw, which is the reason the movie is really a noir. In the end, Stillwater brilliantly, brutally turns its lens back on the Americans.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Stillwater 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

How does the movie handle the topic of suicide? When is it important to talk about mental health, especially if you're worried about a friend or family member? What resources are available to help both kids and adults ?

Does Bill make the right decision by kidnapping Akim? What does he gain from this choice? What does he lose? What were his other options?

Is smoking glamorized here? Are there consequences for smoking? Why does that matter?

How is Bill's alcohol dependency discussed? Is his sobriety shown in a positive light?

Movie Details

• In theaters : July 30, 2021
• On DVD or streaming : August 20, 2021
• Cast : Matt Damon , Abigail Breslin , Camille Cottin
• Director : Tom McCarthy
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Focus Features
• Genre : Drama
• Run time : 140 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : language
• Last updated : August 1, 2024

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‘Stillwater’ and the Post-Truth Struggle for Moral Authority

More by brett mccracken.

TGC reviews media that are not suitable for everyone. To help readers make wise viewing decisions, we recommend reading “ Should I Watch This? ” and checking out a content guide (such as this one for Stillwater ).

Much of the press surrounding the new film Stillwater has focused on its relationship with the true story of Amanda Knox—the American student who, while studying abroad in Italy, was convicted, jailed for four years, and ultimately absolved of the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher. Stillwater director Tom McCarthy ( Spotlight , The Visitor ) has said the film was “ directly inspired by the Amanda Knox saga ”; and indeed, the parallels are clear.

The film (rated R for language) follows an American father, Bill Baker (Matt Damon), who hails from Stillwater, Oklahoma, but is in Marseille, France, trying to vindicate and free his daughter Allison (Abigail Breslin, playing the Knox character). She’s been in jail in Marseille for several years, having been convicted of murdering her roommate and fellow student, Lina. When the French court system refuses to reopen Allison’s case based on a new lead regarding a person Allison insists is the true murderer, Bill takes justice into his own hands.

A blue collar roughneck with a git-er-done posture of American bootstrap bravado, Bill—played brilliantly by Damon—is a fish out of water in Côte d’Azur. He doesn’t speak French, doesn’t understand the nuances of Marseille’s culture (particularly the dynamics of Arab immigrants), and has little interest or patience to learn. He’s there to problem-solve, not to learn. Much of the film concerns the drama—sometimes funny, sometimes tender, often troubling—that ensues as Bill seeks to be a “savior” of sorts on his own terms, fixing something delicate in a culture he doesn’t understand.

‘Aspects of True Events’ vs. ‘True Story’

Stillwater takes twists and turns I won’t get into here (it’s a gripping film best experienced without spoilers), and it definitely diverges from Amanda Knox’s story in significant ways. But the premise is close enough to Knox’s story that the divergences become problematic—and her public outcry against the film is understandable. To what extent should artists be responsible stewards of a real person’s story that they take as an “inspiration” but then significantly rewrite? McCarthy has responded to Knox’s criticism by contrasting Stillwater —which he insists is “work of fiction and not about [Knox’s] life experience”—with his Oscar-winning film Spotlight , which was more obviously a “based on real facts” story and made in collaboration with the real-life subjects. McCarthy said:

It does take from aspects of true-life events, like many films, but Stillwater is about Bill Baker’s journey, his relationship with his estranged daughter Allison and a French woman and her young daughter he meets along the way. The questions the movie poses about American identity and moral authority are what compelled me to make this film.

I think the line between “aspects of true events” ( Stillwater ) and “about real-life events” ( Spotlight ) is blurrier than McCarthy admits, and for that reason the Knox aspects of Stillwater don’t sit well with me. Especially in today’s world—where the increasingly blurred lines between reality and narratives about reality are making our post-truth crisis worse—artists who weave together fact and fiction must do so with the greatest of care. What I loved about McCarthy’s Spotlight was how it celebrated the relentless, unflinching pursuit of truth—a message that Christians, of all people, can cheer. But Stillwater is murkier in its relationship with truth—which is perhaps fitting for these times.

Moral Truths

Setting aside its problematic relationship with the Knox story for a moment, we can certainly appreciate the geopolitical dynamics and moral complexities Stillwater explores.

Artists who weave fact and fiction must do so with the greatest of care.

“The questions the movie poses about American identity and moral authority” are indeed fascinating and thought-provoking. On one level Stillwater is a metaphor for certain American involvements abroad, where good intentions were complicated by hubris, low cross-cultural literacy, and lackluster interest in learning from past mistakes.

I saw Stillwater in July, but it’s been in my mind recently as I’ve watched images of chaos in Afghanistan as American armed forces left. Stillwater is a story of an American who goes abroad to solve one problem but ends up creating more, ultimately leaving certain people’s lives more endangered than they were before he arrived. The film is decidedly not heavy-handed in making parallels to American foreign policy, but the subtext is there.

On another level, the film is simply a moral fable akin to something the Dardenne brothers might make. It’s an unsettling, empathetic look at the self-sabotaging nature of sin. McCarthy makes much of Bill’s “screw-up” nature, a nature that also exists in his daughter. The behavior of both in the film shows the difficult-to-break cycles of generational brokenness. There are moments when both Bill and Allison appear to be growing, possibly moving into a healthier place. But there are also regressions, often caused by that most insidious of human vices—do-it-yourself pride—which refuses grace and undermines growth. This “moral fable” level is the one that most affected me—causing Stillwater (especially its third act) to stick with me longer than expected.

Stillwater is about how sometimes our good intentions—justice for his daughter, in Bill’s case—might accomplish one thing, but end up making other things worse. Sometimes helping hurts . Sometimes working toward a good goal can result in chaos when the means to that end are reckless, impatient, or sloppy. We can undertake good endeavors in bad ways.

Sometimes working toward a good goal can result in chaos when the means to that end are reckless, impatient, or sloppy.

But even as this is one of McCarthy’s intended points in Stillwater , it’s also a mistake he makes. An otherwise thoughtful engagement with important themes is compromised by a morally dubious mining of Amanda Knox’s story—without her involvement. For a film exploring moral authority, Stillwater cedes its own—unnecessarily—by recklessly blurring fact and fiction. It’s an unforced error—the script didn’t need a ripped-from-the-headlines premise so directly drawn from Knox’s story. Bill’s journey could have been explored with any scenario of a daughter’s criminal troubles abroad.

Perhaps the lesson here for Christian viewers is simply that trust and moral authority are hard to gain but easy to lose—especially in a post-truth world where all of us are easily tempted to traffic in truthiness and fake news, and make small compromises on facts, when it suits our narratives. When we do, our reputation as heralds of truth is compromised, and the liberating truth we have to offer (John 8:31–32) is at risk of being dismissed. We lose that most precious of all currencies in the economy of persuasion: trust.

That’s a lesson for Bill as well in Stillwater . In trying to do something good and build trust, don’t skimp on the rigors of process and a dogged commitment to honesty. If you do, a battle may be temporarily won—but so much more will be lost.

Why Do So Many Young People Lose Their Faith at College?

New Testament professor Michael Kruger is no stranger to the assault on faith that most young people face when they enter higher education, having experienced an intense period of doubt in his freshman year. In Surviving Religion 101 , he draws on years of experience as a biblical scholar to address common objections to the Christian faith: the exclusivity of Christianity, Christian intolerance, homosexuality, hell, the problem of evil, science, miracles, and the Bible’s reliability.

TGC is delighted to offer the ebook version for FREE for a limited time only. It will equip you to engage secular challenges with intellectual honesty, compassion, and confidence—and ultimately graduate college with your faith intact.

Brett McCracken is a senior editor and director of communications at The Gospel Coalition. He is the author of The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World , Uncomfortable: The Awkward and Essential Challenge of Christian Community , Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty , and Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide . Brett and his wife, Kira, live in Santa Ana, California, with their three children. They belong to Southlands Santa Ana . You can follow him on X or Instagram .

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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.

Now playing in theaters.

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 .

• Matt Damon as Bill Baker
• Abigail Breslin as Allison
• Camille Cottin as Virginie
• Deanna Dunagan as Sharon
• Robert Peters as Pastor
• Moussa Maaskri as Dirosa
• Lilou Siauvaud as Maya
• Marcus Hinchey
• Thomas Bidegain
• Tom McCarthy

Cinematographer

• Masanobu Takayanagi
• Mychael Danna
• Tom McArdle

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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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• Cast & crew
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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
• Marcus Hinchey
• Thomas Bidegain
• Camille Cottin
• Abigail Breslin
• 545 User reviews
• 164 Critic reviews
• 60 Metascore
• 2 nominations

Top cast 99+

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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

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• Aug 24, 2021
• How long is Stillwater? Powered by Alexa
• July 30, 2021 (United States)
• United States
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• Stillwater, Oklahoma, USA
• 3dot productions
• Amblin Partners
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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 (2021)

A drawn-out love story with interesting locations and stellar performances..

• MPAA Rating: R
• Release Date: July 28, 2021
• Distributor: Focus Features

Stillwater is not what the trailer advertised. I went into the theater expecting to see a thriller about an American father who will do whatever it takes to prove his daughter’s innocence and get her out of a French prison. But that’s not the film I saw. While there are elements of this concept, the majority is really a drama about an American father who falls in love with the French woman who helps him on his quest to prove his daughter’s innocence and becomes a father figure to her young daughter.

Despite this misdirection, Stillwater proved to be a great drama though it’s a slow burn and could do with some reduction in runtime.

Bill Baker (Matt Damon) is an out of work oil worker from Stillwater, Oklahoma who travels regularly to visit his daughter Allison (Abigail Breslin) in Marseille, France. Allison has spent the last four years in prison for the murder of Lina, who was her room mate and lover while Allison was attending university in Marseille.

On his latest trip to see his daughter, Bill is tasked by Allison to hand a letter written in French (which Bill can’t read) to her defense lawyer, Leparq (Anne Le Ny). Bill learns from Leparq that the letter asks Leparq to investigate some hearsay Allison has heard that might exonerate her. However, Leparq refuses to look into it.

With the help of a local resident, Virginie (Camille Cottin), who translates the language and provides a place to stay, Bill decides to extend his stay and do the legwork himself to find the alleged killer in the letter. But as time goes by with Bill creating a new life Virginie and her young daughter Maya (Lilou Siauvaud), he finds himself in an unexpected relationship where he gets a second chance at having a family life.

Matt Damon gives a strong, nuanced performance as a flawed father and working class man who continues to do the wrong thing despite his best intentions. There is much humanity to his character who at first glance could be dismissed as just a backwater Trumper. But he easily destroys that two-dimensional assumption and stereotype with the aid of a thoughtful script that gives his character depth and a reason to root for him. He acknowledges his past mistakes and wants to be a better person even if he doesn’t go about it the right way and so you find yourself wanting him to succeed.

Camille Cottin also gives a solid performance as Virginie, the French single mother, theatre actress who agrees to help an American roughneck exonerate his imprisoned daughter and in the process falls for him. With a life immersed in French, theatrical culture, she’s the perfect opposite to Bill who makes up for his cultural shortcomings with his handyman know-how and his big heart. Cottin is fantastic with her ability to portray the subtle mannerisms people have when they sense or observe something is off in the situation they find themselves in, making her feel all the more natural and authentic.

Writer and Director Tom McCarthy (Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made, Spotlight ) delivers a moving love story about people from different worlds finding love. Even though Stillwater is advertised as a crime, drama, thriller online, it’s far from that and if his goal was to deliver that type of film then he has mostly failed. Sure, the introduction, Bill’s motivation and the reveal at the end all meet the crime drama genre, but these actually fall to the wayside for most of the film and it becomes a love story when the relationship between Bill and Virginie starts to develop.

Don’t let that deter you though, because it’s still a great film that explores many themes about racism, family and the flawed system of law with amazing performances and powerful scenes. But more time is spent on a man forming a new family and falling in love than him solving the crime. The excessive runtime definitely feels like two films stitched together; a short film about a man looking for a killer, and a longer film about the same man not looking for the killer and carving out a new life in France.

Stillwater may not be what the trailer advertised but I still really enjoyed it. If you go in expecting an exciting and interesting investigation into finding a killer then you’ll be sorely disappointed because you won’t get that. But if you want to see a love story, sprinkled with a little crime thriller that is filmed in interesting locations with stellar performances from Damon and all the lead cast, then Stillwater is worth checking out.

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‘Stillwater’ Examines Lives in Wreckage, With Matt Damon at the Center

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

Matt Damon ’s new movie, Stillwater , opens by building up to a gentle but pointed bit of misdirection, the subtle sort of deviation from our expectations meant to say as much about the audience as it does about the man at the story’s center — something of an running theme for this particular movie. When we first see Bill Baker (Damon), he’s waist-deep in rubble, the recognizable but devastated remains of what used to be someone’s home. Bill is a roughneck from Oklahoma, a state squarely, oft-tragically at the center of that mid-U.S. stretch known as Tornado Alley. His main line of work used to be oil rigs; when that labor dried up and he got laid off, he turned to construction. In the wake of a tornado, construction skills are easy to repurpose for demolition and recovery. So that’s what Bill does. He is, at this stage of his life, a maker of things. 

Yet thanks to that tornado, he’s getting his hands dirty in the remains of utter mess, the wreck of lives painfully unmade — another theme in the making. It’s clear early on that we’re meant to experience the world of this movie through Bill’s eyes, or at the very least firmly at his side. When he’s riding home from the wreckage with some colleagues, at dusk, he overhears them saying, “I don’t think Americans like to change,” and “I don’t think the tornado cares what Americans like.” Only they’re speaking Spanish. If Bill understands it, he doesn’t react to it; Damon’s face gives nothing away. Nor is the man overly emotive soon after, when paying a visit to his mother-in-law, Sharon (Deanna Dunagan), and the pair engage each other in naturalistically terse conversation, talk full of ellipses that we don’t realize are ellipses, because real people don’t speak as if they know strangers are watching — and these, the movie is committed to impressing upon us, are real people.

It’s not long before Bill hops on a plane, seemingly all of a sudden, and lands — in France. In sunny, coastal Marseilles, to be exact, a fact that lands with the force of a punchline, despite there being nothing funny at stake in the particulars of this voyage. It’s early in the movie, and Damon — a more than capable actor, whose physical commitment to his roles is, in contrast to his oft-touted ability to “disappear,” remarkably underrated — has already sold us on Bill as a man who could plausibly be the man that the movie wants us to believe he is. He is a “Yes, ma’am” type of guy with an Okie drawl, eyes often hiding behind his wraparound shades, jeans stiff, cap grimed with years of oil and sweat, and an array of plaid shirts, bulgy with hard-working, middle-age fat and muscle, that tells us there’s little distance between a work uniform and everyday life for this man. He’s in France but does not speak French. When it comes to picking accommodations, he opts for what must feel like a slice of home: a Best Western. He is pronouncedly, unabashedly, though not quite crudely, a so-called red-blooded American. So, a fish out of water — and eventually gasping for breath. Stillwater , which was directed and co-written by Tom McCarthy ( Spotlight ), has been advertised and described as a thriller. But it doesn’t open like one. It opens like this: with a slow accrual of details, in which it’s almost easy to miss Bill noticing what appear to be oil refineries just outside of Marseilles, as if he plans to stay awhile; or the fact that the hotel workers already know Bill’s name, making him less of a stranger in a strange land than, to the French eye, simply a little strange. This is an apt choice for a story in which a sense of being out of place while increasingly desperate, having to rely on others while navigating utterly unfamiliar cultural terrain, is going to matter a great deal; it is, in so many ways, the point of the story. 

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Rather, it’s one point of the story. The other part is the stuff that’s gotten Stillwater in a bit of trouble, earning it the courtesy of being called “a calamitous reworking of [a] notorious murder case.” Bill’s not here for pleasure; he’s here to visit his daughter, Allison ( Abigail Breslin ), who’s in prison for the murder of her French Arabic roommate — a case that bears an undeniable resemblance to the 2007 murder of British exchange student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy. This is a case that is more commonly associated with the woman wrongfully convicted — twice — of that murder : Amanda Knox , a fellow exchange student from Seattle, who along with her boyfriend at the time, Raffaele Sollecito, was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison, despite the fingerprints of the actual murderer, Rudy Guede, being present at the scene. Knox was fully exonerated in 2015. She has, it’s no surprise to hear, heard about Stillwater , heard about the resemblance to her case, and is not pleased . 

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And it’s true: The similarities are more than a matter of mere resemblance. The film in fact started, according to McCarthy , with the Kercher murder and the accused Knox more fully on its mind, until the director, who co-wrote the script, became more interested in the surrounding circumstances. But even Stillwater ’s expansion beyond the 2007 tragedy and its aftermath feels somewhat drawn from Knox’s story, given the film’s focus on the heroics — many of them, in the film’s case, wrongheaded — of the accused Knox’s father was one of her most diligent and vocal advocates throughout her ordeal. Stillwater ’s basic premise is that of a man who, after being slipped a note by his daughter and asked to pass it along to her attorney, feels compelled to save her in light of the system failing her. Allison gets a tip that she wants her attorney to look into: a man, she’s been told, has confessed to a murder that bears striking resemblance to that for which she’s imprisoned. Her attorney, calling the tip hearsay, feels it would be wiser not to give the young woman false hope and advises Bill to perform in kind. Instead, Bill steps in and begins to investigate on his own; he can’t afford the private detective that he’s been recommended. And besides, he has some making up to do with his daughter. Theirs is a strained relationship from the start. So begins much invention on the film’s part.

The complications of Stillwater and, really, the meat and bones of its story, have less to do with the Mercher-Knox story in itself than with these inventions. Suffice it to say that Bill has his reasons for wanting to do right by his daughter at this stage of her life and that, for her, it’s too little, too late. He also needs help navigating the labyrinth of a foreign country in which he does not speak the language, in any sense of the word; the movie doesn’t shy away from making good on the promise of his being wholly, stubbornly out of place. Bill, now having to extend his stay way beyond what he’d planned, falls in with a single mother, Virginie (Camille Cottin), and her daughter Maya (Lilou Siauvaud), who become his guides, his English teachers, and — well. 

It makes for a satisfying film in some ways, primarily because of Damon, Cottin, and Siauvaud, and the mere curiosity of their playing house — she a French actress whose work in theater is way above Bill’s head, he a hands-on gentle giant with a past, a man who did not vote for Trump (which he’s of course asked), but only because, as a convicted felon, he couldn’t vote at all. No one has to say: But he would have . But much of what fascinates the movie seems to be the fact that he would have, which carries with it all manner of opportunity for presumption and assumption on the part of the audience. The movie knows what it’s doing when it tees these ideas up and gently circumvents them with a sometimes-effective veneer of human complexity. How will Bill respond when a bar owner he questions starts to spout off rampant anti-Arab comments? And when this story begins to boil down to a white American with an Oklahoma drawl hunting down a French Arab twentysomething who’s done wrong by his daughter, what violence is the film pushing us to expect? 

It’d be more openly ridiculous, feel far more manipulative, if not for Damon’s performance, which — despite his Cambridge-born, Harvard dropout roots — is widely appreciated for what people insist on calling his “Everyman” qualities . I’d sooner say that Damon’s magic is in making a certain plainness, a near-anonymity, defiantly charismatic. This is what makes him great in spy movies like The Good Shepherd , where he practically blends into the surrounding furniture of the movie, and what makes the “Where’s Waldo?” suspensions of belief at the heart the Bourne franchise, or the against-the-odds implausibility of The Martian , so effective. Stillwater depends on precisely that matrix of actorly skill and unvarnished likability; Damon’s other magic trick is removing all signs of the strings holding the performance together, like he’s his own CGI wizard, his own best special effect.

What this means for Stillwater : A  movie that’s complicated, moving, and accordingly frustrating. You can feel it trying to paint the most rigorously humane portrait of, not only its hero, but the thorny sidebars of the situation he’s found himself in — the tense racial discomforts, the nauseating swerves into Bill’s bad decisions. McCarthy’s prevailing approach here as in Spotlight , his nonstyle style, its tempered lack of visual flare paired with its heightened attentiveness to Damon’s (and Cottin’s!) centrifugal star power, feels at times like a ruse for obscuring just how carefully modulated, even calculating, it is in its politics. We can’t help but notice that as his daughter speaks freely about the woman whose murder she’s accused of as being her girlfriend, her red-blooded, prayerful, gun-owning father, who deploys the phrase “fake news” despite by and large refusing to discuss politics, doesn’t even wince. It’s on us, the movie seems to say, that we’d assume homophobia of the man. This is the sly power of McCarthy’s style and intentions: Our assumptions become more readily noticeable as, possibly, matters of projection. 

The illusion often works — until it doesn’t. The movie’s assured realism sometimes butts up against moments that feel woefully misguided, mangled in either the script, the editing room, or both — such as its failure to make proper dramatic sense of characters’ feelings in the aftermath of someone’s suicide attempt, or a late choice to save someone’s ass that doesn’t quite add up psychologically or make sense logistically. The movie’s attentive sense of noticing makes its flaws, its leaps in logic, easier to notice. But this seems to matter less to the filmmakers than what the style has to offer the movie in terms of a message; on this front, Stillwater is tellingly consistent. Damon and McCarthy have both spoken at length about the time they spent in Oklahoma, among real-life roughnecks, earning their trust, learning their ways, feeling more confident in the goodness of the world, the nuances in people, thanks to the lessons learned and memories shared. (“It was truly intellectually exciting and engaging,” McCarthy has said, astonished to the point of near-condescension. “I was impressed by them on a lot of levels. Truly impressed by them.”) 

The realism is not incidental and not unsatisfying. But nor is it always as wise as it would seem. In the best case, what Stillwater encourages are genuine instances of reflection, particularly for and about a man in Bill’s shoes. The connections drawn between anti-Arab sentiment in both France and the U.S. are, by brunt of who Bill is, ripe for consideration. To lean too heavily into this subject would be to shatter the illusion of Bill’s ironic complexity — ironic, that is, for the people who’d be prone to writing him off. But the movie is invested in Bill’s complexity to the point of most everyone else, everything else, getting short shrift. A scene of Bill’s bullheaded, indiscreet wandering through what the movie depicts as something like the Marseilles projects, beholden to the familiar codes of snitching and the like that you’d expect of a scene set in the United States, ends in violence — the central point being a reiteration of Bill simply not knowing how to navigate a place such as this, with the undertone being a little less easily overlooked, a bit too slow to question the racial stereotypes piling up by the second. 

It all — all of it, including the slow-building romance — leads up to a climax in which Bill makes a desperate, unwise decision. He risks everything. Ultimately, as in the case of its relationship to the Amanda Knox story, the movie can’t get around the consequences, for everyone else in this tale, of choosing to be so fully tied to Bill, so singularly focused on his desires and regrets and the idiosyncrasies that make him more than a stereotype, that the decision he makes somehow primarily moves us for what it means to his life, his chances, when there’s in fact another person who’s life is stake. A mistake is made; a rash decision is pushed to a devastating conclusion. Devastating for whom, is the question this film can’t quite face with the fullness that the question deserves.

In moments like this, it’s worth stepping back and asking ourselves who the movie is making us care about, why, and at what cost. In Bill’s case, the choices that pile up toward the end make us feel so fully for him that the movie nearly drives off-road into a rut from which it can’t recover. Dramatically, it works: The agitation we feel on his behalf is effective. Only when it ends do we realize what’s being left unsaid, whose life is ultimately rendered far less worthy of our sympathy and attention. This is when the movie shows us, ultimately and unabashedly, what it is — and suffers for its lack of reflection over what it could be. 

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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.

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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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Stillwater review: Matt Damon is a dad unmoored in atmospheric drama

By the trailer alone, Stillwater sells itself as fairly conventional kind of thriller: a recasting of the real-life Amanda Knox story, told through a lens of righteous parental vengeance. And in its lesser moments Tom McCarthy 's drama does lean toward a sort of Liam Neeson implausibility. At its best though, it's much quieter and more unsettling than that — the slow-churn character study of a man ( Matt Damon ) who is arguably more lost than the incarcerated daughter ( Abigail Breslin ) he's so desperate to free will ever be.

Damon neatly disappears into the role of Bill Baker, a marginally employed Oklahoma oil rigger in stiff Wranglers and wraparound shades. He's the kind of guy whose thousand-yard squint and flying-eagle tattoos look like they were earned the hard way, but he also won't sit down to a sandwich without bowing his head for a proper blessing first. And nearly all the money he makes from his itinerant work goes directly towards trips to France — the same long-haul flight path through Atlanta, Frankfurt, then finally Marseille — to visit Breslin's Allison, a onetime exchange student now more than halfway into a nine-year prison sentence for killing her lover there.

That the victim was a girl and what Bill calls an "Arab" helped make the case an international sensation; inevitably, the headlines have faded, but his hope of rooting out miracles in a byzantine foreign legal system remains. Whatever the allure of a city like Marseille — cobbled streets and seaside cliffs, the eternal siren song of French pastries — he moves through it in a blinkered bubble, checking into the same drab Best Western and taking home his lonely foot-long dinners from a nearby Subway.

A chance encounter with a bohemian single mother named Virginie ( Call My Agent 's Camille Cottin ) and her young daughter Maya (Lilou Siauvad) offers the first inkling of real human interaction he seems to have had outside his brief and only marginally welcome visits to Allison. (He was not, it is heavily implied, a prime candidate for father of the year before her imprisonment.) Virginie turns out to be a godsend when it comes to navigating the intricacies of a country whose customs and language he can't begin to understand, though it's never entirely clear why such a lovely woman would do so much for a gruff and largely charmless stranger — "Refugees, zero waste… He's your new cause," a friend says to her, bemused — except for the fact that he is, you know, Matt Damon.

McCarthy, an Oscar-winning writer-director whose films include Spotlight and The Station Agent , generally crafts the kind of lived-in adult dramas whose unshowy intelligence belies the need for narrative shock and awe. So it's jarring when his script takes a soapier turn, swerving abruptly into not-without-my-daughter Neeson territory and away from the more patient, almost languid onion-peeling of its setup. Damon and Cottin sell the tone shift better than they should, and Breslin brings an itchy urgency to Allison — who even in her too-brief scenes manages to register not merely as a cipher or a victim of circumstance but a flawed, furious girl with her own hopes and agendas.

A lot will probably be made of Damon's foray into MAGA-Daddy drag, and it's a testament to his tightly coiled performance that Bill comes off as nuanced and sympathetic as he does: Though the intrinsic likability that makes him a movie star may be doing half the heavy lifting, you want to invest in this blunt, difficult man. McCarthy also embeds him so deeply in the daily rhythms of Marseille — the back alleys, grubby kebab shops, and sudden dazzling flashes of sun-dappled Gallic scenery — that the movie becomes a kind of immersive travelogue too. The unhurried rhythms of those scenes feel like their own reward, more compelling and true to life than any notion of third-act reveals or tidy cinematic endings. Grade: B

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‘Stillwater’ Review: Another American Tragedy

Matt Damon plays a father determined to free his daughter from prison in the latest from Tom McCarthy, the director of “Spotlight.”

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By Manohla Dargis

A truism about American movies is that when they want to say something about the United States — something grand or profound or meaningful — they typically pull their punches. There are different reasons for this timidity, the most obvious being a fear of the audience’s tricky sensitivities. And so ostensibly political stories rarely take partisan stands, and movies like the ponderously earnest “ Stillwater ” sink under the weight of their good intentions.

The latest from the director Tom McCarthy (“Spotlight”), “Stillwater” stars Matt Damon as Bill Baker. He’s a familiar narrative type with the usual late-capitalism woes, including the dead-end gigs, the family agonies, the wounded masculinity. He also has a touch of Hollywood-style exoticism: He’s from Oklahoma. A recovering addict, Bill now toggles between swinging a hammer and taking a knee for Jesus. Proud, hard, alone, with a cord of violence quaking below his impassivity, he lives in a small bleak house and lives a small bleak life. He doesn’t say much, but he’s got a real case of the white-man blues.

He also has a burden in the form of a daughter, Allison (a miscast Abigail Breslin), who’s serving time in a Marseille prison, having been convicted of savagely killing her girlfriend. The story, which McCarthy conceived of (he shares script credit with several others), takes its inspiration from that of Amanda Knox, an American studying in Italy, who was convicted of a 2007 murder, a case that became an international scandal. Knox’s conviction was later overturned and she moved back to the United States, immortalized by lurid headlines, books, documentaries and a risible 2015 potboiler with Kate Beckinsale .

Like that movie, which focuses on the sins of a vampiric, sensation-hungry media, “Stillwater” isn’t interested in the specifics of the Knox case but in its usefulness for moral instruction. Soon after it opens, and following a tour of Bill’s native habitat — with its industrial gothic backdrop and lonely junk-food dinners — he visits Allison, a trip he’s taken repeatedly. This time he stays. Allison thinks that she has a lead that will prove her innocence, which sends her father down an investigative rabbit hole and, for a time, quickens the movie’s pulse.

McCarthy isn’t an intuitive or innovative filmmaker and, like a lot of actors turned directors, he’s more adept at working with performers than telling a story visually. Shot by Masanobu Takayanagi, “Stillwater” looks and moves just fine — it’s solid, professional — and Marseille, with its sunshine and noir, pulls its atmospheric weight as Bill maps the city, trying to chase clues and villains. Also earning his pay is the underutilized French Algerian actor Moussa Maaskri, playing one of those sly, world-weary private detectives who, like the viewer, figures things out long before Bill does.

Much happens, including an abrupt, unpersuasive relationship with a French theater actress, Virginie (the electric Camille Cottin, from the Netflix show “ Call My Agent !”). The character is a fantasy, a ministering angel with a hot bod and a cute tyke (Lilou Siauvaud); among her many implausible attributes, she isn’t ticked off by Bill’s inability to speak French. But Cottin, a charismatic performer whose febrile intensity is its own gravitational force, easily keeps you engaged and curious. She gives her character juice and her scenes a palpable charge, a relief given Bill’s leaden reserve.

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‘Stillwater’ Review: Matt Damon Is a Dad on a Mission in Tom McCarthy’s Affecting Turducken of a Movie

David ehrlich.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. Focus Features will release the film in theaters on Friday, July 30.

A strained but strangely affecting turducken of a movie that bakes a dad-on-a-mission thriller together with a heartwarming fish-out-of-water story and then a brutal crime drama before glazing the whole thing with a marvelously goateed Matt Damon , Tom McCarthy ’s “ Stillwater ” is the kind of original Hollywood production that would make you say “they don’t make them like that anymore” if only they had ever made them quite this way in the first place. That it’s a French co-production surely accounts for a portion of the film’s structural oddness — several plot points feel lost in translation, even if the whole thing somehow manages to still make sense — but quirks of financing can only go so far to explain a 140-minute transatlantic saga that’s equal parts “Taken,” “Paddington,” and “Prisoners,” one after the other.

No movie with that particular genetic makeup is going to be all that subtle, and McCarthy — who co-wrote the script with Thomas Bidegain, Noé Debré, and Marcus Hinchy — definitely seems to be drifting closer to “The Cobbler” than “Spotlight” during the opening scenes. Sitting in the back of a van as the Spanish-speaking migrant workers in the front seats talk about how much Americans hate to change (hold that thought!), widowed oil roughneck Bill Baker is such a broad caricature of a red-blooded Oklahoman that Damon looks more like a millionaire in disguise on an episode of “Undercover Boss.” We’re talking camo hats, prayers over a Sonic burger, bicep tattoos of an eagle holding a skull, and a pair of black sunglasses that hide any trace of human feeling or any other feminine nonsense like that. Even foreigners can’t help but ask if he voted for Trump (sorry, but this is a spoiler-free review).

And wherever he goes, Bill brings America with him. The biggest change he’s willing to make when he flies to France is a switch from Sonic to Subway. He even stays at a Best Western in Marseille, and not only because anywhere else would cost too much over the course of the two weeks he’s abroad to visit his daughter Alison in jail (a fraught Abigail Breslin, believable down to the grime on her teeth as a thinly veiled Amanda Knox type who’s served five years of a nine year sentence for allegedly murdering her college girlfriend).

But Bill’s eau de American isn’t all bad; while he may be hiding a troubled past under those shades, and eager to impose his will on foreign countries that never wanted him there to begin with, he’s also a genuine helper. He pays his mother-in-law’s bills even though he’s broke. He gets the little girl in the next room over (the adorable Lilou Siauvaud as Maya) a spare hotel key when her theater actress single mother Virginie (“Call My Agent!” star Camille Cottin) comes back late one day, and when she and Maya move to their new flat Bill even stops by to help fix her broken wiring. So he’ll be damned if he’s not going to help his own daughter — who he’s failed in the worst way for most of her life — when she sneaks him some new evidence on the real killer. Alison’s lawyer thinks it’s too circumstantial to sway a judge? No problem, Bill will hunt down the “tall, light-skinned Arab kid” who stabbed his daughter’s ex himself. With a description like that and a handful of helpful racists who are eager to throw any immigrant kid in prison for the rest of their life, what could go wrong?

Needless to say, Bill Baker isn’t exactly Jason Bourne — he’s not even Jeremy Renner — and things go sideways in a hurry. But as “Stillwater” gradually runs deeper, it begins to flow in some most unusual directions. It wouldn’t be revealing too much to say that Bill’s bond with Virginie and Maya strengthens over time, as weeks stretch into months and the two single parents begin to form a platonic kind of family. McCarthy’s naturalistic direction allows the movie to seamlessly pivot between modes even though the script is fragmented into clear act breaks, and there’s a palpable sense of warmth to the long scenes of Bill picking Maya up from school or helping Virginie rehearse for an audition.

Damon’s performance is graced with a quiet softness that offsets the sheer volume of the character he’s playing, and the light comedy of the well-intentioned culture clashes between he and his new roommates is so endearing that you almost forget the tragic reason why Bill came to France in the first place. The light that emanates from his hope for a second chance sparks a new warmth in everyone around him, and there’s a vivid sense that his own ability to make peace with his demons might inspire others to do the same (credit to Cottin for making a wildly contrived living situation feel like a real makeshift home). Acceptance is a hard thing to come by, but even the smallest measure of it can change the way you see the world.

Of course, no matter how beguilingly entertaining it is to watch “Stillwater” drift away from the movie you thought it would be, you know that it’s only a matter of time before the devil gets his due. There are clumsy hints of what’s to come along the way — including a scene of terrible self-harm that offers bafflingly little follow-up, and feels even more half-baked than any of the film’s hesitant overtures toward the soul of America’s forgotten man — and the switch that flips the third act into gear isn’t quite as convincing as it needs to be to fulfill its purpose as a test of faith.

All the same, there’s a whackadoo elegance to the way Bill tears at the scab over his soul during the final minutes. Whatever “sure, Jan”-level twists McCarthy throws our way at the 11th hour (and there’s at least one doozy) are mitigated by a final scene that hits with a surprising amount of force, as Damon and Breslin share a moment that cuts to the heart of what “Stillwater” was always really about, and offers these broken people an outside chance at peace if by some miracle they still have the strength to live with it.

“Stillwater” premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. Focus Features will release it in theaters in the U.S. on Friday, July 30.

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Review: 'Stillwater' a deeply personal human drama disguised as a crime thriller

Matt Damon delivers an indelible, implosive performance in “Stillwater,” a deeply personal human drama disguised as a crime thriller.

The film opens in theaters this week after receiving a five-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival that brought the actor to tears.

Now 50, Damon sets aside the boyish charm that made him a star in 1997’s ”Good Will Hunting” (he and pal Ben Affleck won an Oscar for their script) and such blockbusters as the “Ocean’s” franchise, the Jason Bourne trilogy and his Golden Globe winning “The Martian.”

As Bill Baker, a widowed oil-rigger and ex-con from Stillwater, Oklahoma, Damon is barely recognizable. Thickly muscled under a beat-up cap, with a goatee and a clenched, “yes ma’am” politeness, this good ol' boy hides an intensity that makes him look coiled to spring.

Bill is a fish out of water in Marseille, the French port where this red-stater who didn’t vote for Trump only because a felony conviction forbade it, has come to visit his daughter, Allison (Abigail Breslin), five years into a nine-year sentence for a crime she says she did not commit.

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Portrayed in the media as “that evil American lesbian” who murdered her French-Arab girlfriend, Allison keeps hitting legal obstacles she doesn’t trust the father who neglected her to surmount. It’s a plot that recalls the case of Amanda Knox, the American exchange student who spent four years in an Italian prison before being exonerated for the murder of her roommate.

Download the all new "Popcorn With Peter Travers " podcasts on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Tunein , Google Play Music and Stitcher .

That “Stillwater” doesn’t degenerate into exploitative, true-crime trash is due to the artistry of director and co-writer Tom McCarthy, whose 2015 “Spotlight” won the Oscar for best picture. McCarthy guides Damon and a superb cast around corners you don’t see coming.

Chief among them is Bill’s touching relationship with single mom Virginie, beautifully played by “Call My Agent” star Camile Cottin. Virginie is a struggling stage actress who rents a room to Bill and helps him negotiate the byzantine French legal system while slowly letting him into the life she shares with her 9-year-old daughter Maya (a lovely Lilou Siauvaud).

With this new chance at love, Bill forms ties he never had with his daughter. In a delicate moment that speaks volumes, this makeshift family dances together to Sammi Smith’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”

If only. It’s crushing when Allison, who is allowed one day’s leave from prison, meets her father’s adopted family. Mostly sidelined by the script, Breslin seizes this chance to reveal the pain of a young woman whose life is more than question of guilt or innocence.

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The film flirts with absurdity near the end when Bill feeds into the European cliché of an ugly American cowboy out to save the day. Luckily, Damon works hard to show that Bill is something more complex and feeling than a thug who’d quickly revert to violence to track down a suspect, Akim (Idir Azougli), who might clear his daughter.

Allison claims she saw it coming, that she and her father are fated to be forever screwups. But are they? The film is at its riveting best when it doesn’t try to tie up loose ends for this father who carries two guns but prays before every meal. Even when the final scene of this emotional powerhouse fades to black, “Stillwater” is only beginning to haunt your dreams.

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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.

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Rent Stillwater on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

What to Know

Stillwater isn't perfect, but its thoughtful approach to intelligent themes -- and strong performances from its leads -- give this timely drama a steadily building power.

Stillwater 's slow pace and inconclusive ending are outweighed by impressive acting and a suspenseful story.

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• Animation , Kids

• Voices of James Sie as Stillwater; Eva Ariel Binder as Addy; Tucker Chandler as Michael; Judah Mackey as Karl

Episode Reviews

Tv series review.

Pandas are not known for their adaptability. But at least one of the critters is doing just fine in American suburbia.

His name is Stillwater, and he lives right next door to three spirited children named Michael, Addy and Carl. Shy? Not this panda.

True, he still sports some very panda-like traits: He loves to eat his bamboo, of course, and he’s turned his property into something of a Far Eastern paradise: Zen gardens, koi ponds and even bonsai-like trees make his address look half a world away from the children’s more typical backyard. And in a sense, perhaps it is.

When the children visit Stillwater (which is, as you might expect, quite often), the panda often sits them down and tells them stories: parables and fables and plain ol’ folk tales, often from his far away home. When they worry or fight, he gently turns their minds toward more productive ways of thinking—nudging them along, like a river-bound root might tap a floating leaf in a different direction. Rarely does he “teach” his neighbors anything: Rather, he helps them teach themselves.

Sounds rather Zen, doesn’t it? And that’s just how good ol’ Stillwater wants it.

Bite Into This Apple TV+, Grasshopper

Apple TV+’s Stillwater is based on a series of children’s picture books by Jon J. Muth, the first and most popular o which was called Zen Shorts . But honestly, the show most powerfully reminded me of another franchise entirely: Focus on the Family’s own Adventures in Odyssey .

If you’re not familiar with Odyssey , it features a genial, grandfatherly gentleman named John Avery Whittacker (aka Whit) who, through his homespun ways, offers solid biblical grounding and a little dash of imagination, helps give the children and adults of the town of Odyssey some grand moral and spiritual guidance—often without it feeling like a “lesson” at all.

Stillwater may be a little hairier than Whit, but he has that same gentle, wise charm about him—feeling as old and wise as an oak tree, but still somehow young enough to enjoy a good climb now and then. But instead of peppering his young pupils with Christian wisdom and Bible verses, Stillwater pulls his parables from Zen Buddhism, Taoism and other Eastern religions and philosophies.

That may sound dispiriting and perhaps even alarming to many would-be Christian viewers, who might have seen the show’s beautiful artwork and now lament that Stillwater just might be off limits for their families because of its explicitly non-Christian worldview. I get that.

But while the show certainly draws from those Eastern traditions (and could potentially spark the curious to explore those traditions more earnestly), neither Stillwater (the panda) nor the stories seek to indoctrinate. We don’t hear any explicit references to religion or mysticism at all (though you may hear a reference to yoga on occasion). Those just tuning in wouldn’t see Buddhism or Taoism (unless they squint really, really hard); they’d see a panda who likes to tell stories with some good, universal lessons: Sharing is important. Rain can be good. Be nice to others . They feel like the fables of Aesop—written in a far different culture but with timeless lessons we can learn from in the here and now.

And the artwork—which floats between the more traditional CGI animation of Stillwater’s world to the more storybook art of his tales—is absolutely gorgeous. Taking a virtual walk through Stillwater’s garden can feel a little like a vacation in itself.

Certainly Stillwater has its issues, and if I had to choose between the panda and Whit I’d choose Odyssey’s favorite shopkeeper any day. But this Panda offers some nice lessons, too—along with a healthy serving of bamboo.

May 19, 2023 – S3, Ep1: “Waiting/Bake Sale”

Karl learns about patience. Then Addy figures out the importance of not overcommitting.

A child pouts for a bit but soon learns to use his imagination to pass the time instead of complaining. A traveler accidentally drops several items after agreeing to carry too much. A girl retroactively tells her friends she can’t help them, but they’re understanding and apologize for asking too much of her.

Dec. 4, 2020: “The Impossible Dream/Stuck in the Rain”

In the episode’s first segment, Carl tries to build a spaceship, but he’s discouraged when his older brother says it’ll never get off the ground. In the second segment, Michael pouts because the rain spoiled his baseball game. But when he sees Stillwater sitting in the rain, he ventures out into the wetness to see what’s up.

Stillwater tells him that he enjoys the rain—imagining how far those raindrops must’ve traveled to land on his fur. And he tells Michael the story of the gardener and the bee: The gardener was scared of the little insects and asked a beekeeper friend of hers to get rid of a nearby hive. But when they disappeared, so did all of her beautiful produce. It’s a bit of a science lesson and, if you want to dig, an environmental one, too. But Stillwater tells it in order to remind Michael that while rain my spoil baseball games, it’s a good thing, too. And they end the segment splashing about in mud puddles.

The story Stillwater tells Carl involves a hard-working farmer who wanted to grab hold of the sun so he could have a little more daytime to enjoy. He built a tower up to the sky—a tower for which all his neighbors laughed at him. It’s impossible to grab hold of the sun, they said. But the farmer had the last laugh: The tower allowed him to see over the trees and to see the sun on the horizon when the rest of his neighbors were in shadow. He grabbed those few extra minutes of daylight after all.

It’s possible that some parents might not appreciate the sight of children playing in mud puddles or using good duct tape to build a cardboard spaceship, but that’s about all the quibbles we can find here.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

Emily Tsiao

Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.

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Stillwater Parent Guide

The extended runtime gives this movie real pacing problems, with a notable lull about two-thirds of the way in..

In Theaters: Allison Baker was in Marseilles for a year of study abroad, but has since found herself arrested for a murder she did not commit. Her only hope is her father, Bill, who has come to France to find a way, any way, to exonerate her.

Release date July 30, 2021

Run Time: 140 minutes

Get Content Details

The guide to our grades, parent movie review by keith hawkes.

For the past four years, oil patch roughneck and construction worker Bill Baker (Matt Damon) of Stillwater, Oklahoma has been flying to Marseilles. This isn’t a vacation, though: He goes to visit his daughter, Allison (Abigail Breslin), who has been in prison there for the murder of her roommate while she was a student. Although Bill is certain of her innocence, the French justice system has long finished with the case, and her odds of early release are low. But when Allison slips him a letter with a lead on a potential suspect, Bill begins to hope…until their lawyer dismisses the evidence outright. If Bill wants this investigated, he’s going to have to do it himself – which is going to be nearly impossible, as he doesn’t speak French. Fortunately for him, he meets Virginie (Camille Cottin) and her daughter Maya (Lilou Siauvaud), Virginie is willing to translate for him in return for some help around her ramshackle apartment.

I have two big issues with this movie. The first is that it’s nearly two and a half hours long. Movie runtime is like dog years, so two and a half hours on screen is like two months outside. The pacing suffers as a result, with a notable lull about two thirds of the way in. For those of you not watching the film as part of your job, you can consider this a thoughtful intermission, during which time you could nap, go to the bathroom, and/or grab a snack – depending on how long you plan to nap.

Those problems aside for the moment, this movie is much better than I had feared. From the trailer, I was expecting two-plus hours of “rah-rah America”, in which Matt Damon goes to some godless European city and teaches them how things are done in the middle of nowhere, Oklahoma. That’s thankfully not what happens. While the cultural differences between Oklahoma and Marseilles certainly come up, they are by no means the focus of the film. This is a movie about how our choices affect not only ourselves but our relationships with the people around us. It’s surprisingly restrained in that regard – most of the time, anyway.

If you’re planning on seeing this despite the unholy runtime, you ought to know what’s in it. The biggest issue is profanity, and between French and English cussing you end up with just under 30 f-bombs – although since they’re spread over roughly a week, it could have been worse. There are also some scenes depicting hand-to-hand violence, references to suicide, and fairly frequent drinking and smoking. But after all, this is France, and where would France be without wine and cigarettes? I guess you’d still have croissants…

About author

Keith hawkes, watch the trailer for stillwater.

Stillwater Rating & Content Info

Why is Stillwater rated R? Stillwater is rated R by the MPAA for language.

Violence: An individual is severely beaten and another knocked unconscious in two different physical altercations. A person is shown with injuries resulting from an attempted suicide. One character is imprisoned in a basement and shown with bruises and blood on their clothes. Sexual Content: There are several brief non-descriptive references to sex. A couple is briefly shown having sex without nudity. Profanity:   There are 28 sexual expletives and 25 scatological curses, and occasional uses of mild profanities and terms of deity. There is one scene containing extremely racist language. Alcohol / Drug Use: Adults are seen drinking socially and occasionally smoking.

Page last updated October 2, 2021

Stillwater Parents' Guide

Bill and Allison both make decisions with difficult emotional and legal consequences. How do they face these consequences? Do you think it affects how they make decisions going forward? How frequent are false convictions in your country? How about in France? Or the United States? What are some differences between the French justice system and the American system?

Equal Justice Initiative: Wrongful Convictions

About France: The French Legal System

Erasmus Law Review: Correcting Wrongful Convictions in France

This is based on the story of Amanda Knox. What happened in her case? What do you think could have prevented that conviction? What were the effects of that case on her family? Do you think Amanda Knox is right to complain about the film?

Wikipedia: Amanda Knox

Medium: Who Owns My Name?

Related home video titles:

This movie has some curious parallels with director Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners , starring Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal. It also functions as a curious counterpoint to the over-the-top parental protection in the Liam Neeson action vehicle Taken . Other films about miscarriages of justice include Just Mercy , If Beale Street Could Talk , Brian Banks , The Green Mile , and The Fugitive. For more about crime and policing in France, you can watch Les Miserables .

Stillwater – A Thin and Directionless Derivative Drama

Overall Score

Rating summary.

Just because a film may check all the boxes, it doesn’t necessarily make it good. Films are a collection of plot elements or ideas that are put together in a somewhat coherent manner with a direction. Nevertheless, countless films have gotten away with presenting themselves as an incoherent collection of pieces as long as enough of those pieces hit the right buttons with audiences. This lazy and emotionally-manipulative way to focus on eliciting emotion rather than make a competent film can be hit or miss but is ultimately annoying as it can be said that many films merely do this in order to target awards. Stillwater  is arguably one of these Oscar-bait films. While not bringing anything new to the table any way in terms of story or filmmaking whatsoever, it swings for the fences and tries to get by on eliciting emotion by checking off all the boxes needed to generate a series of those derivative big drama moments. Meanwhile, tying it all together was a mess of a story that could never quite find its footing and was never sure of the kind of film it wanted to be. Clocking in at a running time approaching 2.5 hours, this makes things feel much longer than it probably should have been.

Unofficially based on a true story,  Stillwater  is about a father named Bill Baker (Damon) who travelled from Oklahoma to Marseille, France to help his estranged daughter Allison (Breslin) who had been in prison for the last 5 years for a murder she claimed she didn’t commit (but they were estranged much earlier than that) . Though this reads as an honorable premise on paper, the film quickly becomes a mess that gets so far from this that it’s unrecognizable. Whatever kind of film it happens to be at the time, it is consistently a cliché Southern man in France. The obvious culture and personality contrast inevitably brought upon moments that anyone who has ever seen any film could figure out. From there, the film stayed on that note, making the schtick, especially Bill’s accent, get old very fast and lingered in a way that distracted from almost everything else the film tried or was trying to do. Anyway, just like any devoted father would have done, when no one could help he and his daughter, Bill took matters into his own hands and performed his own investigation.

While the language barrier proved to be a challenge, Bill luckily wasn’t alone as upon his time in Marseille, he befriended an actress and single mother named Virginia (Cottin) and her daughter Maya ( Lilou Siauvaud ). Though he appeared to make some major headway regarding Allison’s case, he could only do so much. However, as much as Bill’s journey was about clearing his daughter’s name, it was also about repairing their relationship. Either way, he was not going to give up that easily and was also not willing to live her side. Choosing to stay near Allison, Bill went about making a life for himself in Marseille at least in the meantime. Meanwhile, he found himself some semblance of a family with Virginia and Maya as he looked to reform his ways and have the kind of relationship he never got to have with his own daughter with Maya. Whether or not it would last was a different matter altogether. Be it Bill’s investigation or his new quasi-family,  Stillwater  was a dull watch as the film as a whole went nowhere.

Eventually,  Stillwater  got back to its initial premise but with all the detours and the circling, it was hard to care by that point. While the plot was a mess and could never find any traction, neither did the characters who were all on the thin side, especially Allison, the reason for it all which made it even more frustrating. That being said, the performances still made the best out of what little there was to work with even though the majority of the character were dull. Damon of course brought his charisma and screen presence to Bill but it didn’t quite work as he, his accent, and his dad bod just seemed too awkward in the role which distracted from the rest of the film. Breslin was okay as Allison but besides the character being thin, her chemistry with Damon wasn’t there. The same could be said for Cottin as Virginia where that lack of chemistry was even more apparent. However, Siauvaud as Maya was absolutely the cutest.

In the end,  Stillwater  is a film that is sure to impact audiences differently, it’s story has more or less been done several times already in better films so there’s not much of a point for prospective audiences to dive into this one unless they are fans of Damon.

still courtesy of Focus Features

If you liked this, please read our other reviews here and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter or Instagram or like us on Facebook .

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.

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‘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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