Matt Damon Reminds Us He's the Best in 'Stillwater'
#141: "Stillwater," "Modern Love," "Charade," "Logan Lucky"
Edition 141:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
In this week’s newsletter: I’m catching up on Matt Damon’s new movie Stillwater, plus I’ve been getting my rom-com fill with a new series on Amazon Prime. Plus a Cary Grant-Audrey Hepburn movie for your weekend? In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Michael Caine threatens Aubrey Plaza with a double-barrel shotgun.
Stillwater
(Theaters)
Actors pride themselves on being able to transform into a role. They’ve been doing it for decades: gaining weight or losing weight, growing out their hair or beard, developing a limp or a stutter, and hopefully never going full “r” word.
One thing I’ve never seen a movie star turn into before is a roughneck from Stillwater, Oklahoma.
The first time I saw this trailer, Matt Damon’s transformation stopped me dead in my tracks. Because I grew up about an hour from Stillwater, and I knew people exactly like Damon’s character. Heck, I had relatives who walked like that! They dressed like that, talked like that. Growing up I probably had a little bit of Stillwater accent too.
As with anyone who sees their particular subculture represented on the big screen, I was thankful quote-unquote “Hollywood” didn’t take any unfair potshots at the Fox News-watching, Bible-thumping Oklahoma dudes I grew up around.
This particular brand of Okie carries himself with a repressed hyper-masculinity, the type of guy who walks around looking like he’s tough and resolute in his beliefs about the world, but underneath his camo hat he is brimming with insecurities.
That makes him the dramatically perfect fish-out-of-water in a place like Marseille, France. The language is different, the culture is different, the people are different. For someone who finds security and identity in an environment of familiarity, to whom different means wrong, this is a place where there is no comfort to be found.
Or maybe he’s just uncomfortable because his daughter is imprisoned there, having been charged with the murder of a fellow student who was her girlfriend. A crime of passion, the police said.
If that sounds familiar it’s because the story is unmistakably inspired by the Amanda Knox saga, but in almost every conceivable way the particulars have been altered (this didn’t stop Knox from raising holy hell about the movie, her primary concern seeming to be *checks notes* that they didn’t pay her?).
This story isn’t really about the Knox stand-in, played admirably by a restrained Abigail Breslin.
It’s about Damon, trying desperately to prove her innocence. He totally nails the character, a reminder (as if we needed one) that he is that rarest mix of movie star charisma and transformational acting talent. His character work is what really carries the movie.
Then as the movie wears on, he slowly morphs from unrecognizable Oklahoma roughneck into…well, Matt Damon, which the movie needs in order to transform itself from a fish out of water character study into sort of a detective story that almost reaches full-on thriller status.
I was impressed that the movie opted not to do the kind of raw nerve father-daughter emotional roller coaster ride (like Prisoners) it could’ve ridden, instead repressing its emotional response in a way that felt appropriate to the character. Without giving too much away, there’s a surrogate French family who raises the questions about what it means to be a father, to be a family.
The ambition of the movie is very nuanced, reaching for some deeper meaning about the complexities of the things we do for love.
And I believe it achieves those goals. It’s no mystery I’m a big fan of writer/director Tom McCarthy, who made Spotlight, but unlike that triumph this story doesn’t allow for a big cathartic release at the end. In that way it could never be as satisfying as Spotlight was, which, no shame, because Spotlight was close to a perfect movie.
So in the end Stillwater is an ultimate example of the oft-misidentified “movies they never make anymore.” Yes, it has a reasonable budget with a movie star in the lead, the standard criteria people bring up. But the ultimate token of the bygone era is when a movie is content to be really good without feeling the need to grab a viewer by the lapels and show “THIS MOVIE IS REALLY GOOD.” There’s no flashy camera tricks, no tinkering with chronology, no special effects.
The movie isn’t a box office smash because understated movies don’t bring people out to the theater (or if you’re an Okie like Damon’s character you’d say “thee-ay-ter”). It’s not going to compete for Oscars because it’s not a triumphant or flashy celebration of the power of movies.
It’s just a good movie.
Ain’t that enough anymore?
From Last Week:
The rave reviews for CODA keep rolling in from readers who saw last week’s newsletter and checked it out. It struck a nerve with many, and I wanted to share one briefly I got from a reader:
It has been a very long time since I've seen a move that has stirred up such emotions. I am not one to shed tears easily and this movie did it - tears streaming down…This movie gave me a better understanding and appreciation for the deaf community. To get the perspective of the parents watching their daughter perform in silence was so incredibly powerful.
Thanks to her for reading, watching, and writing in! Love to hear from you all.
Something New
Modern Love Season 2 (Amazon Prime): Hey, you know all those great high concept romantic comedies they supposedly don’t make anymore? I found them! They’ve been hiding in little 35-minute packages on Amazon, adapted (liberally) by romance master John Carney (Once, Begin Again, Sing Street) from assorted romance columns in The New York Times. So it’s basically like “Sex and the City,” except a million times smarter, more romantic, more clever and better acted. Each episode is its own separate story, and the second batch just dropped last week.
I’ve seen three and loved them all, the best of which starred Kit Harrington (aka Jon Snow) and Lucy Boynton as strangers who meet on a train ride across Ireland. They have a connection, but rather than exchanging numbers they decide - a la Before Sunrise - to meet on the same train platform two weeks later. Except that this train ride was happening in March 2020, and two weeks later the train station is shut down because of Covid-19. Drama! Seriously, this series is awesome.
Something Old
Charade (1963, Amazon Prime): They call it “the best Hitchcock movie that Hitchcock never made,” and this week I finally found out why. Audrey Hepburn stars as a woman set on divorcing her husband who returns from a trip to find him murdered. She is comforted in the arms of Cary Grant (who wouldn’t be), but as tends to be the case in these things, nobody is who they seem.
It’s a really fun and clever caper, whose influence can be seen in everything from Jason Bourne to Pink Panther to When Harry Met Sally. Hepburn and Grant bounce back and forth between being friends and foes as the plot makes each of its dozen or so twists, providing their clever brand of humor along the way bantering back and forth. It’s not quite as clever as His Girl Friday or as kooky as Arsenic and the Old Lace, but the movie serves up a big dose of that irresistible old Hollywood charm.
Something to Stream
Logan Lucky (Hulu): When we talk about empathetic portrayals of so-called Middle America, this Steven Soderbergh heist movie would most definitely not be on the list. But I’ve never understood why the movie nicknamed “Ocean’s 7/11” didn’t end up being a bigger hit. A bunch of hillbillies robbing a NASCAR race? What more could you want. The cast is awesome — Adam Driver, Channing Tatum, Daniel Craig, Katie Holmes, Sebastian Stan, Seth McFarlane, Hilary Swank, Riley Keough — and the story is classic Soderbergh action comedy heist with that big twist reveal at the end. I keep waiting year after year for people to finally discover this movie and it to have a critical reevaluation, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Trailer Watch: Best Sellers
If you’ve never seen the movie The End of the Tour, where Jesse Eisenberg plays a magazine journalist who goes on the road with the enigmatic genius David Foster Wallace (played by Jason Segel) for a profile, you really should.
This movie feels extremely similar to that one, except the genius writer is played by Michael Caine and instead of a journalist it’s a publishing exec played by Aubrey Plaza. The movie couldn’t be more old school, and I’m here for it.