To look at him, Bill Baker (Matt Damon) is a man as plain as his name. He’s a roughneck in a hard hat with an American flag decal. He works in the oil fields when he can, and when he can’t he works in construction or clean-up when disasters knock down the things be built.
Bill likes to call Stillwater, OK, home, but he’s seldom in the namesake flyover town in the new film by director Tom McCarthy (Spotlight). With his family and his own past fractured by alcohol and other drugs, by suicide and other violence, he roams an uncertain economy in search of work, praying before eating his drive-thru fast food and falling asleep on motel room couches with the television on. Bill’s daughter Allison (Abigail Breslin) went to college in Marseilles to escape this dead end, but instead of school she wound up in prison, convicted of killing her girlfriend Lena, a Muslim of North African descent. Allison maintains innocence and Bill believes her with the same unquestioned faith he has in God.
When Bill visits her in prison, Allison slips him a note claiming that Lena’s murderer is a young Arab called Akim. Allison’s attorney insists that such hearsay is insufficient for reopening the case—and there might be hundreds of Akims in Marseilles—but Bill can’t be dissuaded. With his Farm and Fleet flannel shirt and grimy baseball cap, the burly man is as out of place in France as a bear that wonders onto a freeway. He can’t speak French and some of the French pretend to know no English.
Like a film noir protagonist but without the noir style, Bill descends into a labyrinth of housing projects and Instagram posts, searching for clues that could lead to Akim. And if Bill should find him, just one dark face in a city of dark faces, what then?
Thanks to his collaboration with French screenwriters Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré, McCarthy’s astute writing and direction catches the gritty reality of Marseilles, a port city hillier than San Francisco but with the poverty and racial tension of Oakland. McCarthy also represses the narrative’s Hollywood inclinations. The little girl Bill befriends, Maya (Lilou Siauvaud), never becomes his sidekick and is directed too matter-of-factly to fall into cuteness.
Maya’s single mom, Virginie (Camille Cottin), is helpful but often irritated with her new American friend. She’s an aspiring thespian and he can’t grasp the concept of stage acting (you mean, not TV?). She’s an intellectual, given the number of books in her flat, and he seems to have read nothing, not even the Bible. The chasm between Bill and Virginie closes slowly, in realistically unsteady steps. He rents a tiny room in her flat and fixes her plumbing while she serves as translator in his search for Akim. They don’t fall into bed until many months and disappointments have passed.
Damon beefed up for the role and—more importantly—achieved empathy in his characterization. Bill is the sort of character Gary Cooper could have played—a man of few words determined to do the right thing. But in the today world of Stillwater, he’s a hero as well as—in his own words—a “dumbass.” He needs more words in his search for truth than are found in his thin vocabulary and his frontiersman integrity crumbles into cruelty when under pressure. His resourcefulness falls short.
The chemistry between Bill, Virginie and Maya is warm but never sentimental and their story continually teases cliches without falling for them. Bill is Hillbilly Elegy come fully to life, hardworking, devoted and clueless about the wider world. This wouldn’t matter much in a conventional Hollywood movie, where Bill’s stick-to-it-ness would overcome all obstacles, his can-do Americanism triumphing over insidious foreigners with their corrupt ways and incomprehensible customs. In Stillwater, however, happy endings are melancholy and victory can be more bitter than sweet.
Stillwater opens July 30.
