Stillwater (2021)
Directed by Tom McCarthy
Bill Baker, an American oil-rig roughneck from Oklahoma, travels to Marseille to visit his estranged daughter, Allison, who is in prison for a murder she claims she did not commit. Confronted with language barriers, cultural differences, and a complicated legal system, Bill builds a new life for himself in France as he makes it his personal mission to exonerate his daughter.
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3 films that influenced Stillwater
What critics say influenced Stillwater
Spotlight director Tom McCarthy recalls his work on 2007’s The Visitor in this study of two people from very different cultures forging a bond, with Damon and Camille Cottin displaying a grownup chemistry that’s equal parts sexy and touching.
But McCarthy, as in his Best Picture winner Spotlight, lets the story run equal with the themes, and never allows those themes to override.
This is McCarthy’s theatrical follow-up to the Oscar Best Picture–winning Spotlight (he did, in between, make a children’s film for Disney+), and while it has some of the sober fact-finding of that great film, it is more reminiscent of earlier McCarthy works such as Win Win and The Visitor—subtle, well-acted character dramas that take surprising narrative turns.
Here, “Stillwater” becomes a procedural reminiscent of McCarthy’s Oscar best-picture winner “Spotlight,” as Bill knocks on doors and follows one lead after another, talking to people who either help him or don’t in his efforts to exonerate his only child.
Although "Stillwater" is clearly inspired by our memories of the Amanda Knox case, it is not specifically based on it and indeed, director/co-writer Tom McCarthy, in his first film since the Oscar-winning "Spotlight," seems to have little interest in its particulars, preferring instead to center his focus on Bill as he goes about trying to save the remaining member of the family that he destroyed through his bad behavior while at the same time tentatively entering in another familial unit with the extremely helpful Frenchwoman.
Known for better-drawn characters than your average American drama, director Tom McCarthy ( Spotlight , The Visitor ) subverts the audience’s expectations at every corner.
Wikipedia lists 24 films adapted from the Charles Dickens classic "Oliver Twist" and while I cannot say that I have seen them all--the best probably being the 1948 version from David Lean, though I found Roman Polanski's 2005 take to be surprisingly effective as well (and "Oliver!" can burn in hell forever for winning the Best Picture Oscar in a year when "2001: A Space Odyssey" didn't even rate a nomination)--I have certainly seen enough of them to know that I have no real need to see yet another one unless it brings something new and interesting to the equation.
Producers of the Focus Features/Participant/DreamWorks production (pretty much the same combination of companies that gave us the Oscar-winning Green Book) are Steve Golin, Liza Chasin, Jonathan King and McCarthy, who with this film adds another small gem to a filmography that includes The Station Agent, The Visitor, the Oscar-winning Spotlight and Pixar’s animated Up — all films with an emphasis on humanity in one way or another just like this one.