As vibrant and colorful as Marseille, France, is, something you don\u2019t often see there is a plaid flannel shirt.
\nBut that\u2019s pretty much all Matt Damon\u2019s \u2026<\/b>
\nAs vibrant and colorful as Marseille, France, is, something you don\u2019t often see there is a plaid flannel shirt. But that\u2019s pretty much all Matt Damon\u2019s average American character, Bill, wears in the engrossing drama \u201cStillwater.\u201d Bill\u2019s life, however, is hardly ho-hum. An Oklahoma oil rig worker, he isn\u2019t traveling in the seaside city to take in the sights and nosh on foie gras terrine; his college-aged daughter, Allison (Abigail Breslin), has been imprisoned for a year in Marseille for the murder of her roommate she claims she didn\u2019t commit. She\u2019s serving a five-year sentence during the prime of her life. I\u2019m going to take a wild guess and say Amanda Knox will not be watching \u201cStillwater\u201d this weekend. What director Tom McCarthy\u2019s intriguing film \u2014 which is a tad overlong \u2014 deftly explores are the cultural barriers that prevent us from achieving basic goals, such as solving a murder, and connecting with people unlike ourselves. The story is a lot more nuanced than France vs. America. On one of Bill\u2019s prison visits, Allison tells him she heard that a man named Akim was in town bragging that he\u2019d stabbed a woman a year earlier. The French police were never able to find Akim during the investigation to corroborate her story. The media thinks she made him up. Bill tries to reopen the case with this new information, fails and then goes rogue to hunt down the alleged perp. But what makes \u201cStillwater\u201d so unpredictable and unnerving is when it turns, for a sublime moment, into a romance. He meets an outspoken local woman named Virginie, played by the marvelous French actress Camille Cottin, who helps him translate conversations on his quest to clear his kid\u2019s name. Eventually he gets a job there, moves in with Virginie and forms a bond with her little daughter, Maya (Lilou Siauvaud). In time, they become a sweet family unit, but with the inescapable feeling that, with Allison\u2019s murder conviction and Bill\u2019s ingrained Americanness, we know they can never really work out. The film finds a sustained calmness before tensing back into a thriller near the end. Damon does a good job reining in his emotions, which sets up a potent contrast between his Great Plains bashfulness and the French\u2019s forthright honesty. He also has a believable paternal relationship with Breslin, who, imprisoned, looks like a porcelain doll forgotten in an attic. Cottin is the main attraction here, though. Brilliant on the French comedy series \u201cCall My Agent,\u201d which can be seen on Netflix, she is every bit as good in this mostly English, American-made drama. Her motives and deeper thoughts are kept mysterious, and we\u2019re left desperate to know how she truly feels about this man and his mission. It\u2019s a quality that should make her a big star here.<\/p>\n