Stillwater – Film Review

An American oil-rig roughneck named Bill Baker (Matt Damon) travels to Marseille, France, to visit his estranged daughter Allison (Abigail Breslin), in prison for a murder she claims she didn’t commit. Confronted with language barriers, cultural differences, and a complicated legal system, he soon builds a new life for himself as he makes it his personal mission to exonerate her.

Tom McCarthy‘s Stillwater is one of those oddball movies where it’s a strange mixture of overwhelming wholesomeness and searing drama about one man’s journey to free his daughter from prison. One moment we will be watching Matt Damon’s Bill Baker having a relaxing night with his roommate and having some laughs, and then the very next, we’ll see him get into an intense cat-and-mouse chase with somebody he’s after.

Interestingly enough, though, Stillwater doesn’t feel as if it has two different tones but rather, just one – an intense thriller that also just so happens to meditate on our lead protagonist’s life and his day-to-day activities. I’m not being playful when I say that I wish more films with this sort of story would do the same things because it allows us to get into the headspace of our main character and see how their normal daily routine can get cloudy due to this one incident.

The real heart and soul of Stillwater definitely comes from Matt Damon, who is easily one of my favorite actors of all time. Although not every single one of his movies is fantastic, the vast majority of them are (for example, Good Will Hunting quite literally changed my life when I saw it for the first time), and in the role of Bill Baker, Damon proves once again that he’s one of the most diverse actors working today.

Its script is written by four people – Tom McCarthy, Marcus Hinchey, Thomas Bidegain, and Noé Debré – which sounds like a recipe for disaster because usually when something like this happens, a story is bound to be sloppy with different people’s ideas left on the script very visibly. But amazingly, Stillwater has a remarkable script that actually gives Damon’s character a ton of depth to the point where, by the end of the story, you’ll feel as though you have just watched the most important moments of one man’s life played out right before your very eyes.

There are also some truly great supporting roles on display here too, most notably from Abigail Breslin who portrays Allison, Bill’s incarcerated daughter. She delivers a sense of urgency that few actors would be able to accomplish, further cementing Breslin as a criminally underrated talent. Camille Cottin gets an extremely juicy and detailed role here as well and one that took me by complete surprise.

It’s also a gorgeously shot and edited movie as well, by Masanobu Takayanagi and Tom McArdle, respectively. I just wish that Stillwater‘s ending had a little bit more of a punch because I found it fairly dull. It’s one of those endings that, when it happens, you find yourself saying “Was that it? Is there anything more?” before the end credits begin to roll. Gratefully, the journey here is so impeccably well-done that I can’t say Stillwater is bad solely because the ending was a huge shrug. Is it one of the best movies of the year? No. But if you’re looking for an engaging thriller and one that focuses on characters first, then this should do the trick.