He knocks holes in old walls, tears down walls. Not to open your eyes, to create a feeling of freedom. Bill Baker is a simple construction worker, his job includes demolition. He used to work on oil fields.
Matt Damon plays Bill Baker, a redneck from Stillwater, Oklahoma, stocky and bearded, checked work shirt and baseball cap, he has an eagle tattooed on his upper arm. He once had a problem with alcohol. His wife is dead, suicide. Sometimes he bends one knee in prayer, an essential part of his life. When he sits down at table with others, they hold hands and thank God for food and drink. He is once asked whether he is a Trump voter, by a woman who cares about him, but to whom he will remain a stranger. He replied that he didn’t vote last time. He was not allowed to, as a convict. His daughter Allison (Abigail Breslin), who went to Europe as a student, has been in prison for a few years in Marseille. She is said to have killed her lover, who was of Arab origin. She protests that she did not do it, he believes her.
Amanda Knox is outraged by the film. But was she really the role model?
An American student involved in a murder case in Europe that is reminiscent of the Perugia trial that caused an international stir in 2007 – Amanda Know was convicted there of the murder of a roommate, and was eventually acquitted. Knox responded to the movie “Stillwater” in a long article. “Is my name mine? My face? What about my life? My story?” Others, so their allegation, “benefit again and again from this name, this face, this story … without my consent”.
The echoes are enough to be reminded of the fate of Amanda Knox, but not enough to fully grasp it in its complexity. The cinema was fascinated by the sensational and scandalous from the start, more than a century before social media, but ultimately much more open, more outrageous than this.
Amanda Knox has to keep reminding her that she has been absolved of all guilt. Guilt is a big topic in the movie “Stillwater”, especially the guilt of the father who failed to take care of his daughter and who now has to do everything, really everything to get her out of prison.
Bill Baker flies to Marseille, not for the first time. There are new clues about the perpetrator, but the girl’s lawyer is not strong enough to retrial. Bill Baker is more relentless, less discreet, he dares to venture into strange territory to find the murderer, with an imperturbability that seems traumatic and dreamlike, like in a song, that borders on indifference. “I don’t care what’s right or wrong I don’t try to understand …”
Matt Damon and Camille Cottin roam Marseille in search of the real killer.
(Photo: Jessica Forde / dpa)
In the hotel where Bill lives during his stay in the strange city, he meets Virginie, a young mother (Camille Cottin), and her daughter. The woman has just got a new apartment, which is not quite ready to move into, and is staying in the hotel for a few days. She is an actress and helps Bill, who does not speak French, with the research. Later, when the case dragged on and he fell out with the imprisoned Allison, he stayed with Virginie. He is helpful to her, by hand and with the daughter.
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Marseille, the open city, where the diverse worlds are more strongly merged than in the rest of France, the contacts more diverse, but also the prejudices. Virginie refuses to question a guy who makes lousy racist remarks and who would like nothing better than to put another Arab behind bars. Whether Bill has a gun … He replies laconically: two.
You can see Bill trying out forms of rapprochement. Matt Damon is strangely awkward when it comes to hugs – we remember him as wonderfully agile as Jason Bourne, quick, natural reactions, body and mind in one movement. Since he was a lost boySince he had the grace of lost identity and past. Once there is a little dance in the new little family, to the song by Sammi Smith: “Yesterday is dead and gone … and tomorrow’s out of sight. And it’s sad to be alone: Help me make it through the night.”
Stillwater, 2021 – Director: Tom McCarthy. Book: Thomas Bidegan, Noé Debré, Marcus Hinchey, Tom McCarthy. Camera: Masanobu Takayanagi. Editing: Tom McArdle. Music: Mychael Danna. With: Matt Damon, Abigail Breslin, Camille Cottin, Lilou Siauvaud, Deanna Dunagan. Universal, 140 minutes.