Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Stillwater’ on VOD, a Mixed-Bag Drama In Which Tom McCarthy Directs Matt Damon as a Determined Red-Stater

Now on VOD, Stillwater has stirred up some muck in the metaphorical river here. Director and co-writer Tom McCarthy — whose career has recently whiplashed from the woefully miscalculated The Cobbler to Oscar winner Spotlight to offbeat Disney comedy Timmy Failure — says his new film was inspired by the story of Amanda Knox, a Seattle woman whose wrongful imprisonment, and subsequent acquittal, for murder in Italy was an international news story. But Knox raised questions about fair use when she accused McCarthy and star Matt Damon of exploiting her experiences for their gain. So whether you watch Stillwater in a vacuum or within its real-world context — is it a BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie or not? Sort of yes, sort of no — it’s certainly one of 2021’s more provocative movies.

STILLWATER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Bill Baker (Damon) is a middle-aged Oklahoma guy with a pickup truck, camo ball cap, wraparound sunglasses, goatee, Wranglers, blue-collar job, pronounced drawl and a 20-something daughter in a French prison. He gets by. He wears a hardhat while doing tornado cleanup, hits the drive-thru for a footlong and some tots, prays before his first bite, falls asleep in front of the TV and flies to Marseille so often, the hotel manager says “welcome back, Mr. Baker.” He’s coldly polite in his manner — yes ma’am, no ma’am, thank you ma’am. He has two guns. He pronounces “theater” as “thee-ATE-err.” He’s hoping to land another job on an oil rig. The mother of his daughter is dead — suicide. He used to drink too much. He describes himself as “a f—up.” His daughter was pretty much raised by her maternal grandmother. Allison (Abigail Breslin) was in college when she suddenly moved to France, where she eventually was found guilty of murdering her girlfriend.

Allison’s case made major headlines. She’s a few years into her sentence. She insists she’s innocent, and Bill believes her. Bill visits and she wants him to deliver a letter to her lawyer. It’s in French, which Bill can’t speak or read. The letter outlines how someone overheard the real killer at a party say he stabbed the woman to death, and now that they know who this man is, all they need to nail him is to test his DNA. The lawyer brushes it aside as hearsay. Back at the hotel, Bill befriends Virginie (Camille Cottin) and her nine-year-old daughter Maya (Lilou Saiuvaud) in the neighboring room. She translates the letter for him and beyond the investigative details, it reads, “I cannot trust (my dad) with this, he is not capable.” Bill’s brow furrows and Virginie’s expression softens but he holds it together.

And so Bill digs in, to prove his daughter wrong but also to exonerate her, to prove himself worthy and make up for being “a f—up” when she was younger, to assuage his guilt. He could hire a private detective, but it’s too expensive. Virginie helps him, probably because he and Maya are like peas in a pod, and her father is pretty much out of the picture, likely for the better. There’s the language barrier, but there also are social, racial, cultural, political barriers that Virginie helps Bill navigate because otherwise he’d bull-in-a-china-shop right through them to help his daughter, and if that’s an entitled-American thing or a righteous-father thing, I’m not sure, probably both. Neither helps him considering the probable killer is a young man of Arab descent who lives in a project where an angry white guy with an Okie drawl isn’t going to be greeted with a red-carpet party. He gets beaten badly. Cue subtitle: FOUR MONTHS LATER. Bill is still in Marseille. He wears a hardhat on a construction site and pays rent to Virginie for the spare bedroom and picks up Maya at school every day and makes her hamburgs and baked beans for dinner with a big blast of ketchup. “When I see what you guys eat, I understand why you pray before,” Virginie says.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Funny, how the one title in McCarthy’s directorial filmography that’s a procedural emphasizing larger ideas over character drama, Spotlight, won all the Oscars. The rest are small, poignant stories stoked with comedy — The Visitor, Win Win, The Station Agent standing out. Stillwater tries to bridge the gap between the two styles, and winds up being unwieldy and muddled — but still pretty good.

Also: I can’t help but think that Stillwater would stir as much controversy as American Sniper in the bigger BOATS argument in a pre-COVID world.

Performance Worth Watching: Damon’s performance certainly feels like a gritty and authentic portrayal of a Middle American run through the Hollywood filter, for better or worse; it’s hard not to sympathize with the guy’s core quest for absolution, because we’re all optimistic people who love to see others improve for the better, right? Right.

That said, Cottin is the film’s true linchpin, the warm and more deeply earnest performance that it very much needs to counterbalance Damon’s gruffness. It’s Best Supporting Actress-worthy work.

Memorable Dialogue: Allison’s pithy comment is parroted back at her by Bill later in the movie: “Life is brutal.”

Sex and Skin: One horizontal-underwear makeout session.

Our Take: Here’s the scene everyone’s going to talk about: “Did you vote for Trump?” Virginie’s friend asks Bill, point blank. No, he says, because his rap sheet doesn’t allow him to vote at all, and we all groan. Dodgy-dodgy. But it’s important to contextualize the moment next to another scene, in which Virginie — a politically liberal artist-type with a good head on her shoulders — refuses to speak to a man who can help exonerate Allison after he crudely insists all young Arab men “are guilty of something.” “I work with guys like that all the time,” Bill argues. “I’m not saying it’s right. I’m just trying to get my little girl out of jail.”

Such is the politically fraught stuff of the thorny first act, when the film is at its most provocative, and deeply entrenched in its (deep sigh) white-guy perspective. You have to hand it to McCarthy and Damon for cultivating this red-state good-ol-boyish character outside the margins of easy categorization or caricature. He’s clearly OK with the fact that his daughter is gay, he shrugs off the fact that some people are grossly racist, he accepts the fact that violence probably is one of life’s necessary evils. He’s intently focused on the injustice his daughter has been dealt, and he’ll jump any social, political or cultural hurdles that are in front of him. Whether he’s a rightie who swings a little to the left is beside the point. This is the truth as he sees it, and Bill Baker isn’t likely to please anyone on the screen or in the audience.

But once his character is established as a wriggly fish, Stillwater shifts tonally as Bill and Virginie explore a romance, which seems implausible on paper, when you’re not watching the movie and experiencing the ease of McCarthy’s transition. The film gives us a portrait of domestic warmth with too-infrequent bits of light comedy before evolving further into thriller territory. It’s here we realize that boy, this movie sure has a plot. It’s plotted like crazy. Like total hell. It kind of works when we consider the omnipresent simmering desperation of Bill’s character, but the film comes quite perilously close to outright derailment in its final moments.

Stillwater twists itself into ethical knots that McCarthy likely wants to be unsolvable, a picture of the gray areas of life’s rich pageant, in all its ups and downs and ups and downs, some of the hills and valleys rendered plausible, some acceptably implausible, others much less so. But the application of a little common sense dilutes, and therefore clarifies, the film’s murk. It’s an everything-including-the-kitchen-sink drama with many textures, unevenly mixed: A thoughtful character study and complex drama with a discombobulating third act featuring a final, somewhat redemptive scene that’s bold in its depiction of grief and acceptance.

Our Call: STREAM IT. At the end of the day, Stillwater works more than it doesn’t.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream Stillwater