I saw this movie a week ago, and had difficulty coming up with much to say about it, so I'm mostly fine with saying I'm in line with your take.Sabin wrote:File this one under "Movies that didn't take off." I know that Spotlight didn't exactly light up this board but we're talking about a well-respected director's followup to a Best Picture winner and I haven't read many reviews about this thing at all. I'm intrigued by how this movie came about. I'm sure as soon as the Amanda Knox trial began, someone in Hollywood called dibs and thought they had something. While Stillwater is a little more interesting and twisty than one might expect, I don't get the sense that anyone involved with this film formed a more cohesive vision than "We should do something with this Amanda Knox thing."
I can't quite decide that at its core this is a tabloid tale foolishly expanded to The Talented Mr. Ripley-scale or a noble venture grasping at a bit more than it can quite juggle. At the time, I felt the latter but now I'm leaning a bit more towards the former because there's nothing really to hang onto besides some more eccentric choices than one might expect. I could be wrong but I think everybody went into this movie for different reasons: Matt Damon's desire to inhabit Trump's America, Thomas McCarthy to tell a film on a different scale, everyone for Oscars, etc. It feels tugged in different directions.
What works about Stillwater is that it has a more international scale than we're used to seeing from American films these days that aren't espionage pop. At 140 minutes, it gives itself the scale to breathe and go in unexpected directions. My favorite element of Stillwater is how if one were to go into it cold, you'd have no idea it was about Amanda Knox until Damon visits a French prison. In the first act, it has the feel of a procedural with a bit more finesse than one would expect from the "Matt Damon Trumpster Abroad film." Damon himself is fine, a bit mannered at times (you can see him remembering to keep his arms robotically by his side) but there's something very effective about how much of this film seems to happens around him. And I enjoyed the scale of it. But by the end of it, I felt as though everyone had stretched their range of talents a bit to nice results but I don't get the sense that anyone involved with this film formed a more cohesive vision than "We should do something with this Amanda Knox thing."
It wasn't exactly bad and it wasn't exactly good. The relaxed feel of the long mid-portion of the film was kind of a relief from most movies -- but, at the same time, it went on too long if the film was, in the end, going to turn into Prisoners, and then provide that Hollywood-y twist-ending. Also, Matt Damon's final line was almost the textbook definition of too-on-the-nose.
I think you're right, the basic impetus was "let's do something on Amanda Knox" -- which, among all else, is brutally unfair to the real-life person, who is now gong to have lots of people walking around thinking, without evidence, that this is probably roughly what really went down with her.