The most interesting thing about the movie Stillwater is that it spends about 10 minutes of a 2hr 20min movie actually in the town of Stillwater, Oklahoma. But Matt Damon plays a man who so embodies Stillwater that you realize you can’t take the Stillwater out of the man. He embodies his hometown so Stillwater is in 100% of the movie. It’s a very apt title.

Matt Damon’s character brings Stillwater with him to France where he is trying to free his daughter (played by Abigail Breslin) from prison. He doesn’t have a particular set of skills to get this done… he doesn’t even speak French. But he does have bull-headed tenacity and he loves his daughter, who he believes is completely innocent. Yes, the movie borrows from the Amanda Knox story (who is pretty angry about it).

This is Matt Damon’s movie. He plays a reserved, polite, simple midwestern man who didn’t vote for Trump (but might have if he hadn’t been convicted of a crime). This is a fantastic performance that Damon simply vanishes in. He doesn’t use anything in his bag of tricks as an actor. I was engrossed by his performance, watching his nuance and trying to read what the movie was saying about him… or his type of American as he interacts with the French.

And this includes a theater actor woman (and her adorable little girl) who he befriends and asks to help him. She’s on a different social level than him and watching her (and her friends) deal with this rough-around-the-edges guy is interesting. And it’s never quite clear what the movie wants us, the audience, to think. Are we identifying with the liberal artsy theater French woman or with the rustic American who doesn’t understand or care about theater? The woman so abhorrent of a racist she refuses to speak to about the case or the Oklahoman who works with people like that every day but is more concerned about his daughter’s life. This is great storytelling in my book. Leave it to the audience to fill in the blanks with their world-view and interpretation.

I so loved so much of this movie… the way it shows a believable human being dealing with a problem that we’ve seen handled with big guns or melodramatic courtroom speeches in past Hollywood movies. This isn’t that movie… it’s about a guy out of his depth, frustrated and annoyed, but without any real power. It’s also a sweet fish-out-of-water story as he starts to bond with the little French girl of the woman helping him. It was charming. It was sweet.

And then it turns into a Hollywood movie in the final act and my heart sank. Matt Damon’s character does something that just doesn’t really work for the tone and believability of the movie up to that point. It doesn’t turn into Taken or anything overboard but it’s enough to take the air out of the movie’s tires. Add to that a last minute abrupt (and not well acted) revelation, and the ending of this movie is just rough. I get what Damon means in his last line, but I didn’t think the movie really earned it due to the final shoddy few moments.

Still, I liked enough of the movie…. but I was bordering on loving it until the end. I loved what this film was doing, how much respect it gave the audience, and Matt Damon’s excellent and understated performance. This is still a very good flick.

Score: 87