WATCHING STILLWATER

Director Thomas McCarthy made the Academy Award-winning film Spotlight (2016). It recounts The Boston Globe’s unravelling of cover-ups of sexual abuse crimes by Roman Catholic clerics and the collusion of Boston law firms. 

His 2021 film Stillwater is available on Channel 4’s catch up service, All 4. While not as strong as Spotlight, it is nonetheless a very insightful treatment of a family tragedy, using a crime thriller story-line to deliver a watchable and moving romance-drama. 

Stillwater presents a telling allegory of the USA today.

These films incline the viewer to keep an eye out for other work by McCarthy.

Bill Baker (Matt Damon) is an American roughneck, built for hard labour on oil rigs and construction sites. He is as taciturn as a mule, but behind the quiet is a fevered anger, stoked by poverty, loss, alcoholism and injustice. He is polite and mannerly. His “Thank you Maam’s” echo throughout the film. He prays with fervour at each meal. His anger - some might term it passion were he middle-class - drives a quest. He lives to prove his daughter’s, Allison Baker (Abigail Breslin), innocence for a crime he is convinced she didn’t commit.     

After a short prologue in Oklahoma, on an oil-field and in his mother-in-law’s house, the film lifts off with Bill when he travels to Marseilles, where his daughter is incarcerated for killing her lover. He has travelled to the French Mediterranean port many times. This trip is different, because he meets Maya, aged 8 (Lilou Siauvard), and her mother Virginie (Camille Cottin).

An uneasy, then warm, relationship grows between the adults, cultivated by Maya’s charm and Bill’s love for the child. There is a running joke at meal-time, when Bill offers hand-holding prayer and invites Maya to conclude with “Dig in”, an echo of his roughneck life. He delivers a great speech about digging and holes through dinner prepartion.

The adults grow closer. In one post-coital, morning-after scene, without dialogue, a gorgeous image of domestic comfort centres on Maya, with colouring pens and paper, grinning knowingly at the adults seated on the nearby sofa. 

Bill has new information. He is determined to track down a local man he is sure will clear his daughter’s name. The search takes him to La Rouvière, Marseille’s city within a city, near the Stade Vélodrome — home to the local football team Olympique de Marseille (OM). Using the stadium as the launch pad for the final scenes fleshes out just how out of his depth, culturally, linguistically and politically Bill is amidst the divisions that characterise Marseilles.

Bill encounters these divisions and the survival techniques people use, when he works for a dodgy builder and makes a solo run into La Rouvière, where he very quickly gets into trouble.

Bill is America, on an individual scale. He just wants to do good. Why can’t people see that? Why won’t people comply? But people have had enough of outsider arrivistes, their demands and their solutions, generally relying on the force of arms or money, as if they were the only people with problems. A friend of Virginie asks Bill if he voted for Trump, expecting him to say ‘yes’. It’s the question and expected answer in the viewer’s mind throughout. 

Alison, Bill’s daughter, is also America, on her own different, individual scale. She just wants to get as far away as possible. Why can’t people let her do what she wants? Why do people bother her? Why won’t people just go away, when she’s had enough of them? But people will take her money to do her bidding, even at great cost to themselves.

Scenes near the end of the film resonate with allegory. 

- A vacuous home-coming for Alison, led by MAGA-yearning politicians and Oklahoma locals, festers cringe. It reminds the viewer of the heart-break of families and the callousness of politicians, as seen in detainee returns in Israel and Palestine recently. 

- Alison sits smoking with Virginie, while on day-release parole. She reveals how broken she feels, without acknowledging that her actions are the driver for the tragedies that grip the people around her.

- Later, she sits on the stoop with her father, in a classic image of America at home. She says the world still looks the same. Bill says it has changed. It will never be the same to him again. The deep malaise in Allison, which she takes to herself, is an allegory for contemporary US society. Bill sees his home place with new eyes, following his experiences out of the country. His trials overseas have given him new insights. Allison sees only herself and her deserving.

Marseilles is Marseilles, in all its beauty and depravity, its vivacity and division. 

Jean-Claude Izzo, a French poet, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist wrote three neo-noir  crime novels set in Marseilles in the 1990s, worth reading for a view of the city’s divisions and the lives people build there: Total Chaos, Chourmo, and Solea.

Stillwater naturally echoes The French Connection, though Bill is not Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle. He is tough enough, but less vicious. His sensibilities are awakened by Maya and Virginie, but his legacy-quest to aid his daughter impels him into violence and tragedy.

Stillwater? Highly recommended.

Stillwater; film; Thomas McCarthy; Participant Media LLC, 2021

French Connection; film; William Friedkin; Philip D’Antoni Productions; 1971

Jean Claude Izzo; writer; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Claude Izzo

An article on Marseilles: https://themarkaz.org/cities-within-the-city/

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WATCHING ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

When Peter Bradshaw’s film of the week in The Guardian (London) gets a five star review and David Fears in Rolling Stone (New York) describes it as 

a parable about fathers and daughters, a conspiracy thriller for the ICE age, an ensemble comedy that encourages all-stars to get their best eccentricity on, the single greatest film of 2025

One Battle After Another might be a Hollywood film worth seeing. It is. At least twice.

Director Paul Thomas Anderson has a back catalogue of Hollywood art-hits that sets movie moguls drooling. His oil baron epic, There will be Blood, starring Daniel Day Lewis, was listed as ‘the greatest film of of the 21^st Century’ by New York Times critics. 

Is Anderson ‘the thinking person’s Quentin Tarrantino’?

That auteur’s drive is seen in the opening scenes of One Battle After Another, when an underground revolutionary grouping, French 75, led by African American women, releases detainees from a holding centre, while pulverising it. We meet two of the film’s protagonists: Perfidia Beverly Hills, (Teyana Taylor) and "Ghetto" Pat Calhoun / Bob Ferguson, (Leonardo Di Caprio). They exist in a highly sexualised world, charged with the power of her political energies and the explosive materials he uses. Their inter-racial relationship thrives on sex, war and revolution. It is heady stuff, and just about holds together as an extended prologue, to the gear change that shifts time forward 16 years, when a product of their union is introduced. 

We meet Willa Ferguson/Charlene Calhoun (Chase Inifiniti) at a martial arts session with her sensei  Sergio St. Carlos, (Benficio del Toro). He is a Karate teacher and a leader of the off-grid community in Baktan Cross, where ‘wet backs’, immigrants from across the border south of California, find scantuary.

This scene uses the Steely Dan song Dirty Work (from Can’t Buy a Cheap Thrill, 1975) in what one commentator described as ‘the greatest needle drop in cinema today’. Watching and listening to it, the viewer realises that once again Paul Tomas Anderson has drawn from his childhood in Hollywood to put a film experience in front of us that could only come from that cinema-saturated part of the world.

Introducing us to Willa Ferguson re-introduces us to another of the film’s heavy-weight protagonists: Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a military officer hot on the case of the French 75, and most particularly, on the case of Perfidia Beverly Hills. Lockjaw’s obsession with Hills, a not entirely convincing relationship, opens the thread of the story that lampoons far-right ideology and groupings, in particular its fear of miscegenation.

The film’s good guys are leftist radicals, acting against authoritarian elements within the US government. Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) live under assumed names in Baktan Cross, as French 75 goes further underground, with informers penetrating its membership. Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) hunts the group down.

The scenes of the group attacking an immigrant detention centre feel current, rather than historic. Time is eliding over itself and everything is happening now, as it can in the best dramatic work. We are in screen time/stage time/now, with Time’s Arrow perpetually moving forward. The characters age and grow frail (Bob) or feisty (Willa). He becomes a protective, if inept, Dad. She becomes a woman, re-working the energy of her mother. The world changes and la lucha continua (the struggle continues).

Anderson doesn’t offer a handbook for the most effective form of rebellion. He presents Bob’s efforts to reconcile his youthful idealism with his middle-aged caution. Willa embodies the paradox of the future Bob fought for, a simultaneous win and loss, whose responsibility eventually passes to Willa herself. There will be young people fighting fascism, however they can. Anderson offers a moderate, incremental-change vision of political upheaval, along with the admission that things could get much worse. There is no utopia or celebration of political violence by state or anti-state forces. There is simply the endeavour by individuals to band together, to protect themselves from the violence of poverty and oppression, finding hope and love in their young, even as they age. 

They live the necessary indulgence of hoping the fight isn’t over. 

La Lucha Continua. Ahora. Siempre. 

When Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) is loaded into a refuge incinerator by two figures in white hazmat suits, we know the dirty work continues.

I'm a fool to do your dirty work, oh yeah

I don't wanna do your dirty work no more

I'm a fool to do your dirty work, oh yeah

One Battle After Another – recommended? Highly.

One Battle After Another; film; Paul Tomas Anderson; Ghoulardi Film Company; USA; 2025

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READING LUCY BY THE SEA BY ELIZABETH STROUT

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout is a sweet, sad book, set in ‘this sweet sad place we call Earth’, as written in its last line. It is short and slow, readable and occasionally tiresome. It is set among older, white, East Coast North Americans and their adult children. It is full of their First World woes. Not that the woes of miscarriages and relationship breakdowns are to be disregarded, but if context in a novel matters, then the context here is benign, even with the ravages of Covid 19 close at hand. Thus the woes are diminished.

The novel sits in the second of two traditions, cleverly described by Colm Tóibín in his essay Losing the Plot. Tóibín suggests stories are either driven by plot, with actions and their consequences, or stories work by creating an atmosphere through language, its rhythms and textures. Lucy by the Sea is in the second silo. That will determine a reader’s response to it.

The language is conversational, as Lucy talks directly to the reader.

Here is is a story about people we met through Margaret and Bob. 

But let me mention some sad things that happened before the event, … 

I noticed that I did not feel sad.

I do think this: I do think it was the happiest I have been in my life.

This gives the book a disarmingly child-like tone. The title reminds the reader of children’s books. Strout’s conversational style enables her to be candid and intimate in her presentation of the characters and the richness of the small world she creates for them. There are echoes of the work of John Updike in Couples.

Lucy by the Sea is a pandemic novel, infused by the sensibilities of the well-off. Lucy, and other successful writers, have the means to flee New York, when the city locks down in March 2020, often to coastal colonies, cocktails in hand, with the siren calls of mass plague well behind them.

There’s not much vigour in Lucy’s rambling musings on fragility and regret. She recognises she is ageing and becoming aged, as are the people closest to her. She is self-absorbed, turning inward, to savour her own exceptionalism. Just like her country at this time.

Any notion of characterising this novel as an example of ‘the local being universal’ is unfounded. Unless the reader accepts that life in the USA is universally human in a way that life in Indonesia, Zambia, Brazil or Spain is not. I doubt Arundhati Roy will right a novel, where she and her family escape from a pandemic by moving down the coast from Mumbai, detaching themselves from the context of the plague happening all around. 

When Lucy yearns for New York and her previous life, she mourns less for the city’s Covid victims and more for her lost loves and her good life. Isolated yet secure, she ponders her current good fortune, while failing to connect it to her impoverished origins.

She knows that some people are luckier than others. She has no answer as to why this is so.

“The question of why some people are luckier than others,” Lucy observes. “I have no answer for this.” 

This may be disarming, but it is also tiresome and disingenuous.

The reliance on luck – fortune – without any sense of context, confirms the novel’s immaturity. Lucy and her fellows are child-like, cocooned by their privilege. They are ‘un-present’, except in their cocoon.

Strout’s work is prize-winning and she is lionised. There is a vibrant market for her novels. Principal characters overlap between her books. They are hugely successful, commercially and critically. The friend, who pointed me at her work, suggested I read Olive Ketteridge. I’m not sure. I’ll certainly have a few reads in between. Something by Barbara Kingsolver perhaps.

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout? Recommended? If you fancy something sweet, sad and self-involved. It won’t scare the horses in the paddock outside.

Lucy by the Sea; book; Elizabeth Strout, Penguin/Viking, London, 2023

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A LANDLORD MEETS A LOCAL, NEAR UU MAGEE: A true-life scene

A LANDLORD (m, 45) and a LOCAL (m, 70) stand outside a coffee shop, in the neighbourhood of the UU Magee Campus. The LANDLORD finishes a phone call, as the LOCAL prepares to mount his mobility scooter. They don’t know each other. They strike up a conversation.

LANDLORD: That’s a fine café there.

LOCAL: Yep. It’s our local. 

LANDLORD: I’m surprised to see it round here. Like, I’m surprised to see how residential this area still is.

LOCAL: Changes are happening. There are lots of transient occupiers here. More coming. 

LANDLORD: That’s what has me here. I have two HMO houses further on up.

LOCAL: I need to be direct with you ...

LANDLORD: ... Fire away. I like direct ...

LOCAL: ... Direct and civil. I’m one of the long-term residents who strongly opposes the glut of HMOs in this area. So, directly – get out of the HMO business. You can still make money, renting your property, longterm, to a family or to adults, sharing. 

LANDLORD: The students leave the place in a heap when they ... 

LOCAL: Imagine living next door to that.

LANDLORD: (Laughs) I wasn’t great when I was at college.

LOCAL: Me neither. Crammed into dives in Ranelagh, near UCD Belfield, we were. Today’s HMOs are the modern equivalent. Get out of them. Rent to long-term tenants with proper contracts and penalties ...

LANDLORD: I consider myself a good landlord ...

LOCAL: No doubt, but, as long as you’re renting HMOs, you’re compounding the glut and all that goes with it. 

LANDLORD: The Agent tells me the market in HMOs is finished. 

LOCAL: Residents and the councils, here and across the water, are pushing back against them...

LANDLORD: He says emergency accommodation is the way to go now. The Holylands HMO market in Belfast is gone. It’s full of foreigners.

LOCAL: More people being exploited by bad conditions. Residents there are doing their best to have good living spaces for all, meanwhile ...

LANDLORD: The bottom line is the money.

LOCAL: You own the assets. The agent is using you, while abusing the people of this area. Get out of HMOs. Get out of transient occupation. Return your houses to the city’s rental stock and this’ll be an even nicer, mixed residential area.

LANDLORD: Why doesn’t the University build accommodation for students?

LOCAL: Best ask the University. The Magee University Campus Task Force report said the commercial sector would provide student accommodation. In Belfast that means specially built blocks. In Derry, it means people like you, private landlords, often not from here ...

LANDLORD: I’m from down South. I have properties in Armagh as well. No HMOs. Just rentals.

LOCAL: Why’s that?

LANDLORD: No university campus. No market for HMOs.

LOCAL: That so? University policy and practice, coupled with the bottom line for agents and landlords, degrading a fine residential area. 

LANDLORD: I wouldn’t mind another chat, if ...

LOCAL: You get out of HMOs and the like and, the next time you’re here, I’ll buy the buns and the coffees.

The LANDLORD re-enters the café. The LOCAL mounts his mobility scooter and departs.