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/
www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter
