After the excellent Spotlight, filmmaker Tom McCarthy is back with a new feature film inspired by real events: Stillwater. For the occasion, he decided to set his cameras in Marseille with the actor Matt Damon. He also hired French actors led by Camille Cottin. Stillwater is inspired by the Amanda Knox case in which a young American girl studying in Italy was convicted of the murder of her roommate.
Stillwater: an exciting human adventure
Tom McCarthy moves away from the journalistic fervor of Spotlight to rush into a touching human story. He detaches himself from politics to get closer to more intimate emotions. Stillwater is a work that bases his main interest on very controlled emotional springs, which offers an endearing relationship between Matt Damon (Bill Baker) and his daughter Allison played by Abigail Breslin. Matt Damon is incredibly precise as an average American, inspired by Trump's policies, but who learns to evolve, to grow up to find his daughter, locked up in a Marseille prison. A restrained character of impressive strength, who will rise by crossing the road of Virginie, embodied by Camille Cottin who seems to be delighted to be in the cast of Tom McCarthy's film. 
Stillwater is thus a perfectly controlled human adventure, which offers emotional sequences that never fall into pathos or one-upmanship. The emotional elements remain true, without artifice, without forcing, without ever falling into caricature. Tom McCarthy thus offers natural human relationships, free of any unnecessary cinematographic artifice. Stillwater keeps his feet on the side of fiction, but the universe of the Phocaean city is well transcribed, and emotions are never calculated.
The meeting between two worlds
And then, above all, the collision between the American universe and the French universe is extremely attractive. Tom McCarthy takes great pleasure in playing between the two worlds. To play both on French clichés, but also American clichés. The opposition between the two countries is perfectly represented, whether through politics, racism, money, celebration, and simply the way of life. Even if the filmmaker sometimes uses some crude clichés (the representation of the city, the woman or the average Frenchman), the chemistry between Matt Damon and Camille Cottin outweighs the few imperfections. 
To contrast Marseille from Oklahoma, Tom McCarthy decided to use two different stagings. In France, the director favors hand-held camera shooting, while in the United States he mainly used sequence shots. A way for him to divide the two worlds of his film in a simple and effective way. The goal is to represent the stillness of the protagonist's life in the USA. A way to represent his monotonous daily life, redundant, and without real twists. While when he arrives in Marseille, his life changes completely and is punctuated by novelties and risk-taking. https://youtu.be/ScAifNwOEHU Big success Stillwater. Even if the film is sometimes too long, it distills a precise emotion and impressive power. The emotional springs are grandiose and Matt Damon is impeccable.
