There’s a moment in “Stillwater,” in which Matt Damon stars as Bill Baker, an Oklahoma oil worker trying to get his college-age daughter, Allison, out of a prison in Marseille, France, when Allison asks Bill: “Dad, what is wrong with us?”
For all those reasons and more, “What’s wrong with us?” winds up the most “thematically important” question of the movie for Tom McCarthy, who directed “Stillwater” from a script he co-wrote with Marcus Hinchey and French screenwriters Thomas Bidegain and Noe Debre. (The film opens in theaters on July 30.) “I think that’s a question we could be asking nationally,” McCarthy said recently during a Zoom interview from his Tribeca office. “I think it’s a question we could ask each other. I don’t care where you sit on the political spectrum or the cultural spectrum or the national spectrum. I think there’s a question there that reflects this time.”
McCarthy began working on “Stillwater” almost 10 years ago, when the case of Amanda Knox — who was imprisoned in Italy after being convicted of murdering a fellow exchange student — was dominating headlines. He and Hinchey were intrigued by Knox’s story and hammered out a script, but the result — a straightforward thriller that left tabloid sensationalism behind and instead focused on the young woman’s father — left him cold. “It lacked a human dimension,” he explains. “And ultimately I didn’t have a point of view on it. Why am I telling this story? What’s beneath the floorboards? I couldn’t answer that question.”
So McCarthy shelved the script and dove straight into another project he was developing: a journalistic procedural titled “Spotlight,” which in 2016 would win two Oscars, including for best picture. It wasn’t long after that when, during a family vacation at the beach, McCarthy took another look at his “Stillwater” screenplay and thought, “Man, I really love this setup, I really like the first eight pages. I just don’t like the rest of the script.” He reached out to Bidegain and Debre — whose work with Jacques Audiard McCarthy had admired — and they began to collaborate, shuttling back and forth from New York to Paris to Marseille.
Then, in November, Donald Trump was elected president.
“That’s when the movie really started to happen,” he recalls. “I suddenly felt like I had a real point of view on this movie. . . . I felt like there was a reason to really explore this character, this part of the country. And I really loved the idea that we’d be doing that from the vantage point of Marseille, from a different place and time. There’s almost an expat quality to it, like you’ve got to get out of the country to see where you fit in it.”
“Stillwater” is animated by cascading cultural clashes and misunderstandings, most of them involving Damon’s character, a taciturn, working-class middle American whose eyes are perpetually shaded by a worn-out gimme cap. Whether Bill is struggling to communicate with his alienated daughter (Abigail Breslin), embarking on a tentative friendship with a boho-chic French actress (Camille Cottin) or making uncomfortable incursions into Marseille’s Middle Eastern community, “Stillwater” often feels like a movie that is processing America’s own confounding historical moment in real time.
“We spent a lot of time talking through it,” McCarthy says of the writing team, “knowing that we weren’t making an overtly political movie, but [that] there’s politics in the DNA of the movie and specifically in the DNA of the character, on some level.
“To zoom out from a particular party or red or blue state, there was a bigger question,” he adds. “We started passing articles back and forth, both [written] within the U.S. and from outside the U.S., about America’s moral authority. Has America lost its moral authority? Has it abandoned its moral authority? Does it even care to have a moral authority anymore, or is it just looking in? That’s what nationalism is, [and] populism. Is it more concerned with its own people and what’s happening internally than being that shining light on the hill?”
Even more subtly, “Stillwater” reflects cultural changes that paralleled but also intersected with the anxieties and ructions of the Trump administration, whereby in the wake of such movements as #OscarsSoWhite, #MeToo and Time’s Up, the undisputed primacy of middle-aged White guys like McCarthy and Damon was unceremoniously challenged. Although Bill Baker doesn’t swagger or seek out opportunities to offend — he’s buttoned-up to a fault, at least until a climactic confrontation late in the film — he’s nonetheless an avatar for a form of unconscious privilege that stems not from wealth and power but from insularity and blinkered self-belief.
While he was working on “Stillwater,” McCarthy read “Strangers in Their Own Land,” sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s 2016 book about tea party supporters in Louisiana. “There’s a very specific image that she talked about, where she felt like she was interviewing a number of White, rural Americans and there was this prevailing opinion that they were suddenly at the back of the line and they didn’t understand why,” McCarthy says. “That image is a really powerful image and certainly something that I shared with the French writers, and something we talked about in terms of Bill Baker and how he’s feeling about himself and his life.”
As he read Hochschild’s book, which was reported in 2013 and 2014, McCarthy was struck by a theme of generational trauma that many of the families shared; that language “directly impacted the film,” he says, specifically in the way it plays out in Bill’s life and his relationship with his daughter. That tone of shame, guilt and unresolved grief makes Bill a tragic figure rather than the MAGA-hat-wearing stereotype his new French acquaintances often assume him to be.
Indeed, it’s possible to see parallels between Bill Baker’s journey and McCarthy’s own. He had visited Marseille almost a dozen times on research trips, he says, before realizing in 2017 that he still hadn’t been to Oklahoma. “I was on a plane the next day,” he says. Over the course of a week, he traveled from Oklahoma City to Tulsa and Stillwater, hanging out with oil workers and executives, embedding himself as much as he could, and reporting his impressions back to Bidegain and Debre. He was supremely self-conscious about being a “filmmaker from New York dropping into what was arguably one of the reddest states in the country.”
As a stranger in his own land, and in the midst of the tumult and toxicity of the early Trump years, McCarthy says, he welcomed the chance “to hang out with a bunch of roughnecks from Oklahoma and laugh and meet their families and eat barbecue and have them show me their world.”
And he realized that you don’t have to cross an ocean to gain an expatriate’s perspective. “I came back and went, ‘Man, it’s really politics that are dividing us,’ ” he recalls. “It’s literally the job of politics to divide us, to split us up so that they can corral our votes and secure their power. I left there and I was so bitter about that.”
Even the people he met with whom he violently disagreed, he says, are “a fascinating part of the American dynamic. And it was really exciting to explore and get to know them. In that crazy time, it was a bright spot where there weren’t a lot of bright spots.”
