by John Zenoni
Having wanted to watch ‘Stillwater’ with Matt Damon since seeing the trailer in the theater, I jumped on the chance to watch a free screening this past week. There's been a lot of noise around Matt Damon and his performance so I had to see it for myself.
The film, directed by Tom McCarthy, is about oil-rig worker Bill Barker, played by Damon, who has a daughter in prison in France for the murder of her girlfriend that she says she is innocent of committing. Barker travels to see Allison, played by Abigail Breslin, and tries to help get her case to be looked at again only to be turned down and shunned by just about everyone previously involved with it. Frustrated and convinced of his daughter’s innocence, he decides to try and do investigating on his own. During the process, he meets a local French woman, Virginie, played by Camille Cottin, who agrees to help him and to whom he becomes romantically involved. He becomes especially connected to Virginie’s young daughter, Maya, played by Lilou Siauvaud, and begins to treat her as his own. As things begin to look bad in terms of getting his daughter’s conviction overturned, Baker finds someone who he'd been looking for that had ties to the case and was convinced that, with DNA evidence, could be charged with the crime. This is when the story takes a twist and things change.
The film has an interesting plot so that works in its favor (although it has drawn many comparisons to the real life story of Amanda Knox, but I have to admit to not really keeping up with that case). The performances are definitely worth mentioning as well. Everyone does a great job, especially Matt Damon, who embraced this character and is very believable as a rough neck father trying to get justice for his daughter. While it's a good performance, I don’t consider it to be his best. The main negative in my opinion is that the film is way too long. It's almost 2 1/2 hours and while I can appreciate trying to give as much detail as possible, some of the scenes could have been edited.
Overall though, this is a good film with an especially surprising ending. At least I didn't expect it to end as it did.
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