What a strange thing, to sit in a theater in France and watch an American movie about France. Though, I’m not sure that Stillwater—the new film from Spotlight director Tom McCarthy, which premiered here at Cannes on Thursday—is actually about France. Rather, it concerns the way that Americans, or maybe just America itself, behaves abroad. From one vantage point, Stillwater may just be a sentimental and lurid riff on the infamous Amanda Knox case. But I think McCarthy has something bigger in mind, which he pokes at intriguingly throughout his movie’s considerable sprawl.
Knox became infamous when she was arrested, charged, and convicted for the murder of a fellow university student while studying abroad in Italy. (She was later exonerated and sent home to the States, but questions about her guilt or innocence have endured in the years since.) McCarthy shifts that action to Marseilles and begins long past the trial, when twenty-something Allison (Abigail Breslin) has been imprisoned for five years. Her once-estranged ne’er do well father, Billy (Matt Damon), regularly travels from rural Oklahoma to visit her. The details of Allison’s specific case are gradually explained to us, a murky night of violence that left Allison’s girlfriend, who was Arab, dead, and a mysterious second suspect in the wind.
Stillwater delves, both directly and indirectly, into the fraught racial politics of contemporary France, as new information in the case leads Billy into a housing project largely home to Black and Arab people pushed into the margins of French society and very often unfairly targeted by police. In these scenes, the film treads dangerously close to a hoary cinematic form: communities of color used as exotic, menacing backdrop for white heroics. I think McCarthy is aware of that, though, and is using a bad, tired structure to turn the commentary back on Billy and Allison—and on their country.
There is a long interruption in the investigation part of the film, as Billy finds himself improbably ensconced with two locals—mom Virgine (Camille Cottin) and her young daughter, Maya (Lilou Slauvaud)—and starts to build a new happy life for himself. This stretch of the film is almost its own movie, a sweet, lo-fi look at family found and chosen. Damon has a winning rapport with Cottin and Slauvaud, who both give bright, winsome performances. How did we end up in this happy place when what we embarked upon was a fictionalized Amanda Knox movie?
That is one of the strange questions at the heart of Stillwater, a novelistic movie that eventually binds its disparate threads and tones into something surprisingly resonant. The sweet lying next to the sinister (and intertwined with it) is the contrast McCarthy is trying for, I think, to lull us into a cozy complacency before reminding us who these people represent, what havoc American intrusion can wreak even when—perhaps especially when—it is claiming good intentions.
When violence reenters the picture, it’s a plot turn that is, on its face, ridiculous. Which may be the point, a soapy climax meant to echo real calamity, adventurism that is almost absurd in its recklessness. Once the sunniness of the middle section of the film is gone, Stillwater collapses into a bleak conclusion, McCarthy closing his film as bluntly and hauntingly as the Coen brothers ended No Country for Old Men. Stillwater certainly doesn’t compare to that masterpiece, but it still startles, teasing that this whole thing may have been a grand allegory all along.
Damon is a compelling presence throughout, clamming himself up into “yes ma’am” laconicism but still palpably suggesting the storm lurking under Billy’s frayed cap and baseball pitcher’s sunglasses. He never demands our sympathy nor courts our suspicion. It’s an unfussy performance, despite the goatee and Oklahoma twang and good-old-boy roughness. McCarthy is, as ever, good with his actors, helping them find the right measure of restraint and cinematic beam.
The film will be out in the States later this month, where I’d imagine it will be received varyingly. It’s not the dutiful, leering re-creation of a sensational case that some might hope for, and is full of pointy, sometimes discordant ideas and details that make it hard to categorize. It’s rather remarkable that a big Hollywood studio is releasing this difficult, curious film. I hope people give its heady mix of melodrama and political allusion a chance. Because Stillwater does—I have to say it—run deep.
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