Still­wa­ter – first-look review

Mul­ti­hy­phen­ate movie man Tom McCarthy has a var­ied cred­it list. Notable high­lights include play­ing a cor­rupt reporter in The Wire, work­ing on the sto­ry for Pixar’s geri­atric tear­jerk­er Up, and being respon­si­ble for Adam San­dler shoe fan­ta­sy-dra­ma The Cob­bler. But most know him as the writer/​director of 2016’s Best Pic­ture win­ner Spot­light, which por­trayed the Boston Globe’s ground-break­ing report­ing into his­toric sex­u­al abuse with­in the Catholic church.

Win­ning an Oscar isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly a guar­an­tee of future work, but McCarthy’s career has tak­en a strange turn since then. He worked on the screen­play for Marc Foster’s Christo­pher Robin in 2018 along­side Alex Ross Per­ry and Alli­son Schroed­er, and wrote and direct­ed 2020’s kid-friend­ly com­e­dy Tim­my Fail­ure: Mis­takes Were Made for Dis­ney+. His lat­est project is a return to more adult ter­ri­to­ry, even if tonal­ly it retains some of the chaot­ic ener­gy McCarthy’s CV possesses.

Matt Damon plays Bill Bak­er, a rough-hewn Okla­homan oil work­er who makes fre­quent trips to Mar­seille to vis­it his daugh­ter Alli­son (Abi­gail Bres­lin), who has been in a French prison for sev­er­al years fol­low­ing a con­vic­tion for the mur­der of her girl­friend and room­mate Lina. Alli­son main­tains her inno­cence, and when a new lead in the case presents itself, Bill sees an oppor­tu­ni­ty to do right by her after fail­ing as a father when she was young. Nav­i­gat­ing a for­eign legal sys­tem proves to be an uphill bat­tle, how­ev­er, so Bill turns to his new acquain­tance – sin­gle moth­er and actress Vir­ginie (Camille Cot­tin) – for help.

Sim­i­lar­i­ties with the real-life 2007 mur­der of Mered­ith Kercher are obvi­ous from the out­set. Just as that case attract­ed a media fren­zy around con­vict­ed-then-acquit­ted sus­pect Aman­da Knox, the script (writ­ten by McCarthy, Mar­cus Hinchey, Thomas Bide­gain and Noé Debré) touch­es on local spec­u­la­tion sur­round­ing the case. Bill brush­es up against tight-lipped teens and dirty cop­pers in his pur­suit of the truth, and quick­ly realis­es he’s in over his head. 

If this sounds like the recipe for a fair­ly text­book thriller, McCarthy makes some ques­tion­able nar­ra­tive choic­es which lead to a sense of nar­ra­tive whiplash. The core sto­ry­line butts up against a roman­tic sub­plot, while racial and class ten­sions in Mar­seille are also touched upon, as well as the poten­tial vio­lence of white women’s tears. There are a lot of ideas crammed into the film’s 140-minute run­time, and they often com­pete for atten­tion to its detriment. 

A thriller explor­ing the weapon­i­sa­tion of white female fragili­ty and white male vio­lence is an intrigu­ing con­cept (and a more inter­est­ing one than Still­wa­ter can real­ly deliv­er) but this theme is explored only as an after­thought. Bill’s rela­tion­ship with Vir­ginie and her young daugh­ter Maya, who rep­re­sent anoth­er chance at redemp­tion, is giv­en more screentime.

Denis Villeneuve’s Pris­on­ers is a usu­al cin­e­mat­ic com­par­i­son, albeit a bet­ter exe­cut­ed tale of des­per­a­tion and guilt. Still­wa­ter ges­tures towards pre­scient issues and ques­tions that we rarely see white film­mak­ers grap­ple with, but over­all the film feels unfo­cused and fails to pack a real punch. A dis­ap­point­ment, then, but an odd­ly com­pelling one all the same.

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