Stillwater — A Film About American Stereotypes

Directed by Tom McCarthy; written by McCarthy, Marcus Hinchey, Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré

Still water– which premiered at the Cannes film festival in July and was subsequently theatrically released in the United States by Focus Features – is a generally intriguing critique of the attempt to rank individuals or groups.

Matt Damon and Lilou Siauvaud in Still water

Tom McCarthy’s film tells the story of a father who goes to great lengths to free from a foreign prison a girl he believes has been wrongly convicted of a serious crime. In this effort, Bill Baker (Matt Damon), an Oklahoma oil rig worker, travels to Marseille in the south of France and navigates a totally unfamiliar environment with all of its contradictions and challenges.

Bill’s daughter, Allison (Abigail Breslin), who has served five years in prison and faces four others for the murder of her roommate and lover, has found what she believes to be important evidence, the name of ‘a person who could be responsible for the crime. His French lawyer refuses to attempt to reopen the case on the grounds that the new information is only hearsay. Bill lies to Allison about the lawyer’s snub and sets out, rather recklessly (and, at some point, half-heartedly), to find the man named, a certain Akim (Idir Azougli). Throughout his investigations, he meets Virginie (Camille Cottin) and her young daughter Maya (Lilou Siauvaud) and gets involved, for better or for worse, in their lives.

Rather than being an action movie for the most part, Still water strives to bring to life the situations and conditions of those involved on both continents.

Abigail Breslin and Matt Damon in Still water

McCarthy explained that the original inspiration for the film was the Amanda Knox Affair. Knox spent nearly four years in an Italian prison following her conviction for the 2007 murder of another exchange student with whom she shared an apartment in Perugia. In 2015, Knox was finally acquitted by the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation. Although the film departs heavily from that story and focuses on fictional characters and fictional events, Knox objected to McCarthy’s use of his story without his consent, to the detriment of his reputation.

In any case, McCarthy’s film treats its characters sensitively and generally examines their flaws with compassion. However, while the film criticizes some prevailing moods and tendencies in liberal and “left” circles, particularly the snobbish disregard for working-class residents of states like Oklahoma, it does not sufficiently examine these phenomena. .

Following the 2016 election, McCarthy (The Station Agent, The Visitor, Win Win, Spotlight) reused a movie he started making in 2011. Still water has been largely transformed from a thriller into a drama that explores stereotypical characters and cultures in media and popular culture, not to mention American politics, including “backward rednecks”, “socialist France”, etc. .

At the start of the film, Baker cleans up the wreckage of a house destroyed by a tornado. We also see a couple trying to scavenge what they can of their possessions, while two women sit mournfully in front of what was once a fireplace. Bill lost his job in the oil industry and did the cleaning job for a living. His stepmother, Sharon (Deanna Dunagan), claims early on that she cannot be trusted with simple chores, and throughout the film the viewer feels for Bill like someone who, in the face of serious mistakes of the past, continues painfully, persisting when everyone has abandoned it.

One of the central themes of the film seems to be how a person can change – for the better – when placed in a different and more forgiving cultural setting. Still, there is no happy ending, and the viewer feels the force of the past acting on an individual like Bill, despite the change of environment and his best intentions.

To develop Baker’s character, McCarthy and Damon spoke to workers at Oklahoma’s oil rigs, observed them, and tried to understand their condition. In an interview, McCarthy talks about wanting to “get past the expected story points” – which would be a portrayal of thugs as not deserving of sympathy, as being responsible for their own fate. McCarthy is commended for taking this path, and much of the film’s strength lies in its depiction of how humans from very different backgrounds can help each other.

Still water also criticizes a dominant vision in certain circles – of a virgin and liberal France, with a higher culture, greater social equality and a more sensitive population, unlike the American “thug”. We are introduced to one of Virginia’s friends, rigid in her preconceptions about Bill and Oklahomans (“Do you own a gun?”), As well as a racist bar owner who calls Arab teens “apes” . We also see misery, misery and gangsterism in Marseille projects, “the reverse” of French life.

Without revealing too much of the narrative, we can simply point out that McCarthy is doing a revealing satire of local Oklahoma politicians, in their two-sided duplicity – who know nothing and do nothing, but repeat deceptive slogans designed to garner votes in the next election, when those, in this case, who know the truth are only a few feet away from them.

The film fleetingly addresses the level of desperation, neglect and brutality that reigns in rural or semi-rural Oklahoma. At one point, when talking about her father, Allison sadly points out to Virginia, “This is shit. He always has been. I know it because I have it in me too.

Matt damon

Still water does not do enough, however, to overcome the immediate harshness of reality for the somewhat misanthropic views of the Bakers and Allison. The phrase “Life is brutal” is repeated, but the filmmakers do not even hint at the true social and economic roots of this brutality.

Life is not brutal for everyone in Oklahoma, including notable natives and corporate looters like billionaires T. Boone Pickens and Henry Roberts Kravis. The population of the state has been particularly vulnerable for decades to the vagaries of the oil industry. After the oil economy collapsed in the late 1980s, for example, Oklahoma was looted, its infrastructure systematically dismantled, federal subsidies drastically reduced, and employees laid off and fired upon.

In all, Still water is not a movie made for oil rig workers. This appears to be essentially McCarthy’s attempt to convince his fellow Liberals, after the 2016 election, that not everyone in Oklahoma and other such areas is a racist, Trump-loving reactionary. It is at least a limited objective. People with such silly views of the upper middle class are hardly worth talking about.

McCarthy tells a story that reveals more than he perhaps realizes. He refers to a conversation with an oil rig worker who “didn’t hate Hillary. [Clinton] that, but she told me she was going to stop oil and fracking, and if she does, I can’t put food on my table. This highlights some of the critical class and economic issues, and the Democratic Party’s inability to attract broad support from the working class. In fact, “socialist” Bernie Sanders beat Clinton by a large margin in the 2016 Democratic Party primary in Oklahoma. In 2018, tens of thousands of teachers across the state led a two-week militant strike, a struggle ultimately betrayed by the Oklahoma Education Association and the Oklahoma City-American Federation of Teachers.

Still waterThe last moment is poignant. In Bill’s response to Allison’s comment that nothing in their hometown has changed in all these years, he says, “Everything looks different to me, I barely recognize it anymore.”

The viewer gets the impression that Bill sees the same landscape, but with new eyes – something that he has experienced has made him understand the world better or more deeply. The spectator leaves the cinema wishing good luck to the father and the daughter.

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