In 2003, writer and director Tom McCarthy debuted with The Station Agent (Crossed tracks), a film in which the then famous actor Game of Thrones, Peter Dinklage, unraveled it as much as the realization. But it was On the front page (Spotlight) which gave him the most fame, winning the Oscar for best film and best screenplay.
McCarthy’s last film, matter of blood (Stillwater) is not similar to any of the two mentioned, except in the quality of its protagonists.
Matt Damon is Bill Baker. Both he and his daughter Allison (Abigail Breslin) survived the suicide of the mother of the family as best they could. Bill, who worked in oil wells in Oklahoma, is not doing well in his new job as a builder. And it’s Allison’s grandmother who took care of them both. But for some reason, Allison isn’t home. She’s not in Oklahoma. She is not in the United States.
She is in France, in Marseille, and to be more exact, in the women’s prison of that coastal city, to the south.
Bill doesn’t like to talk about it, but Allison was sentenced to 9 years in prison (she already spent 5 behind bars) for the murder of the Arab girl who was her partner. There is an opportunity to appeal: someone says that someone else told him, at a party, that he murdered a woman and that he was not caught.
Anyway, Bill, with his cap and goatee, takes his savings and takes a flight to Marseille, where he has already been several times.
With Abigail Breslin, who plays Allison, his daughter.The father/daughter relationship has not been the best, usually due to the father’s absence due to a job as an oil driller. And perhaps that is why Bill is not honest with his daughter and tells her that the lawyer to whom he gave Allison’s letter rejects the possibility of reopening the trial.
intimate drama
matter of blood (Stillwater in the original, due to the city where they lived with Baker) could launch into the thriller when Bill sets out to search for the murderer himself. But McCarthy prefers intimate drama, although it shows the chase scenes, the beatings and – not to mention resolution – a handling similar to that which Juan José Campanella gave to The Secret in Their Eyes (you will already know where he sees the suspect: in a stadium football) and more.
Bill finds the alleged murderer in a football stadium, as happened in “The Secret in Their Eyes.”McCarthy reinforces the issue of intimacy with no less important information. Bill ends up living in the house of Virginie (Camille Cottin), a French independent theater actress, in an I’ll help you, you help me relationship, and taking little Maya (Lilou Siauvaud) to and from school.
Camille Cottin, one of the French stars accompanying Damon. The actor of In search of destiny y rescue mission He is on screen almost all the time, alone or accompanied by Camille Cottin or Abigail Breslin, who as a child was Little Miss Sunshine. The lack of definition of the genre does not always work in the film’s favor.
Crime/Drama. United States, 2021. Original title: “Stillwater”. 139′, SAM 13. Of: Tom McCarthy. Con: Matt Damon, Camille Cottin, Abigail Breslin, Lilou Siauvaud. Available in: Netflix.