Stillwater: critic who mates Damon – EcranLarge.com

MAT DIAMOND

We had left Tom McCarthy in the rain of Spotlight Oscars, effective journalistic drama, but academic, without expecting much from this honest storyteller a little too clean style on him. That was until he returned by the Cannes red carpet, where he presented in 2021 Stillwater, a story whose beginnings are not without evoking a certain Taken, to which he grafted several elements from real news items. Matt damon slips into the shoes of Bill, worker from Oklahoma disembarking in Marseille in the hope of saving his daughter, accused of the murder of his girlfriend and imprisoned in the Marseille city.

And it is Damon who is the main asset of the feature film. From the opening, while he is followed in what still resembles a naturalist chronicle of proletarian America, the actor imposes a presence, a tempo, far removed from his most recent performances. His massive body occupies the screen, just as it seems to encumber this man whose value system we feel has been inexorably undermined.

A vigilante in the city

We find him at work, participating in the dismantling of houses, rolling along endless tongues of asphalt, praying over the burger he ordered in the middle of a fast food restaurant that looks like a depressed beehive. Characterized with empathy and never icy or sardonic distance, Bill is perhaps America’s first echo of the election of Donald Trump, whom Hollywood treats without an underlying political agenda or satisfied contempt.

The actor perfectly inhabits this massive and constrained physiognomy, simultaneously plagued by doubt and steeped in contradictions. A hard worker with strong convictions, Bill is also a father who must uproot himself in order to hope to find his daughter, whose character and life are at odds with his. Before the scenario turns to the side of investigation and anger, the‘plot takes care to give as much space as possible to this type who is trying to understand a universe the reverse of his own, and during the first third of the film, the attention with which the camera scrutinizes the humble politeness of this fractured man is startling.

Before kick night

His hunched back, his voice misted with tears when he apologizes for existing in front of an examining magistrate who does not understand his vulnerability, ideally echo another existence embarrassed by both his environment and circumstances. That of Virginia, embodied by a Camille Cottin less volcanic than genuinely skin-deep. The spectacle of these two beings that everything opposes, except perhaps their erratic wanderings, is a small precision, both in terms of interpretation and writing.

Assassin police

TAKEN AND BARBIE

And it is the writing that allows Stillwater to leave an imprint on his viewer. Yes Tom mccarthy and Marcus Hinchey were the main architects of the feature film, the latter had the good idea to appeal to the excellent Thomas bidegain and Noah Debre. A way of framing the whole with visions more in touch with the Marseille reality, giving the whole a point of balance between American and French protagonists, a measure and a solid grip in reality. The success of the device is obvious, as the film manages to embrace the city in its many facets, its contradictions, its outbursts, both in life and in death.

Hence a powerful immersion, all the more interesting as it places the French public in an exciting situation, where they can simultaneously see the relevance of the gaze, while experiencing the deep turmoil that embraces Bill, as he finds himself up against institutions, but also habits, traditions, social rites, which he does not understand. It is in this second part that Damon’s interpretation becomes more intense. again, when we observe this monolithic body, which the very space, its alleys and its dead ends, refer to its notion of radical foreigner, close and yet irreconcilable.

Football revelation

Evidenced by a striking scene, as Bill evolves somehow in the heart of the Vélodrome stadium, during a Marseille Olympic match. Stuck in the crowd, impervious to fever, moved by a different tension regime than the surrounding supporters, he immerses us in his subjectivity, which contaminates this sequence filmed on the spot, the intensity of which increases a little more with each shot. In this moment, the director finds the ideal distance to move away from the expectations of the revenge film, or the paranoid thriller such as Europacorp has it in the same dusted and caricatured movement. This will unfortunately be the only opportunity of this kind seized by the filmmaker.

Indeed, and this is the great weakness of this often moving story, Tom McCarthy is only too rarely up to his actors or his script. The abundant and organic photography of Masanobu takayanagi is sometimes an illusion, so much does it confer on Stillwater a catchy atmosphere, by turns melodramatic and sticky, but once again, the filmmaker and his cutting are sadly illustrative.

It is often difficult to detect a true point of view, a statement, as if the project manager never wondered about what he is filming, about the meaning of its cutting. Everything that the whole gains in readability, it loses in power, especially when the story is forced to leave the creeks of the drama to dock in the old port of the thriller.