Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Stillwater sees Oklahoma roughneck Bill Baker played by, checks notes, Matt Damon? Well, alright then, if you must, whose daughter Abigail Breslin’s Allison is languishing in a Marseille gaol after being convicted of killing her girlfriend, a crime she denies. On one of his trips to visit, Allison gives Bill a letter to her lawyer, saying she’s heard third-hand chatter that someone has bragged about being the real killer. While that’s not enough for the lawyers to do anything with, it is enough for Bill to stay in Marseille and investigate.
That’s stymied a little by Bill not speaking much French, but he has some assistance from an acquaintance, Camille Cottin’s Virginie, who owes Bill a favour, and soon the two become friends, and more than that, despite the free-spirited theatre actress and the taciturn oilman having seemingly little in common. The investigation goes well, then poorly, with the suspect getting spooked and taking flight thanks to Bill’s botched attempts, but another opportunity presents itself months later that leads to Bill taking rather more extreme actions to exonerate his daughter.
To be clear Stillwater is a fine enough film, with a clutch of good performances and postcard-pretty visuals in places, but I just could not get into this at all. While I’ve read that the wider point of this is not the crime investigation at all, but a look at how Bill and Allison deal with their guilt about the situation and choices that got them to this point, I just don’t think there’s enough shown of Bill’s character to carry it off, and as Allison is barely in the film that’s not much of a help.
At the risk of giving it a shorter shrift than it really deserves, I just don’t think I’ve got a great deal to say about Stillwater. It’s not really doing anything I dislike – the closest it gets is that initially Matt Damon seems a touch miscast but he’s a good enough actor to pull it off. It is, sadly, just not a film that could find any attack surface to get its hooks into me, so it’s hard to think of this as anything other than, y’know, fine. Which, curiously, makes it much harder to recommend than this episode’s demonstrably worse Prisoners of the Ghostland, which at least had a car-crash spectacle to it.
Relentlessly average.