Stillwater: Blu Ray Review

With eerie parallels to the Amanda Knox story, Tom McCarthy's Stillwater is a film that never quite nails the emotional beats it needs to to fully succeed.

Matt Damon is Bill Baker, a former oil rig worker, who goes from job to job after being laid off. With a goatee, paunch and a relatively monosyllabic and myopic approach to anything outside his own world, McCarthy's film reveals Baker has a daughter Allison (Little Miss Sunshine's Abigail Breslin) in a Marseilles jail, convicted of murdering her roommate.

Halfway through her sentence, Allison asks Bill to task her lawyer to investigate a new lead in the case. But when the lawyer says they can't pursue it further, Baker decides, against his daughter's wishes, to look into the lead.

However, Baker is alone in a foreign country, so he strikes up a chance relationship with his hotel neighbour,  a crusader for refugee rights and who decides to help.

Stillwater has an inherent drama to explore, but comes up hollow more than anything compelling.

Despite being nearly two-and-a-quarter hours long, the film leaves its exposition and contrivance of coincidence until near the end, robbing the film of the pacing it's set out, and leaving the audience suffering some kind of "What the?" whiplash.

It's a curiously emotionless piece too, with the emotional beats of the story ripped from under you before audiences have a chance to process what's happening - and for a story that's supposed to be about an imprisoned victim of a crime, it chooses to place Breslin's Allison on the very peripherary of proceedings.

That may not matter in parts, with Damon playing Baker as a post-Trumpian refugee abroad, largely unwilling to embrace many of the local traditions of the area he's found himself slung into. But when the time jumps occur near a pivotal moment on screen, the feeling is very much an approach of "we don't care, so why should you?" from the filmmakers.

And yet in amongst it all, there are moments when Stillwater succeeds in its cliched story of a man looking for another chance. Despite largely being under a cap and wraparound sunglasses, Damon still manages to conjure some of the required mettle for the quieter moments imposed upon his character.

His dance with Camille Cottin's Virginie and her young daughter have a real tenderness to it, and a space to breathe from its initial reticence to genuine need for help and connection.

Stillwater(s) may run deep, as the saying goes, but in this film, due to some of McCarthy's flaws, they don't quite run deep enough to assure the richer veins needed - there's power to be had within Stillwater, but it largely remains untapped.