Screen Notes: Stillwater; The Green Knight

Stillwater dir Tom McCarthy

Stillwater is the new drama by Tom McCarthy, an actor and director who began his career as a filmmaker with the memorable, low key film The Station Agent in 2003, and in 2015 won the Academy Award for best picture with Spotlight. While the agenda of Spotlight is illuminated powerfully in the final credit sequence, displaying an endless list of the catholic churches involved in widespread sexual abuse scandals, the film itself didn't work for me as a throwback to the terse filmmaking of the 70's and 80's (McCarthy himself sites the influence of All the President's Men, Network, The Killing Fields), and felt more like an inert, although admirable and convincing, blend of journalism and naturalism. Stillwater is similarly convincing in stylistic approach and narrative trajectory, essentially a fish-out-of-water story involving an Oklahoma roughneck living in Marseilles while trying to prove his daughter's innocence, imprisoned on the charge of murdering her roommate. Matt Damon plays roughneck Bill, and Abigail Breslin his jailed daughter Allison. But, the film is most engaging in it's depiction of Bill's evolving relationship with French theatre actor Virginie, played by Camille Cottin. Virginie and her young daughter Maya, played by Lilou Siauvauda (who shines bright in a role that occupies some considerable screen time for such a young actress), take in the floundering American and begin to form a precarious new life together. Stillwater has a few lengthy passages that are alternately character-centered and story-driven, but I found it compelling in both modes, for the most part, even if the final passages of the film bring a few swells of uninspired scoring that feel simultaneously cheap and appropriate. Ultimately, the story is much more Bill's than Allison's, and while the script airs on the side of resolution where some ambiguity might have been more productive, and the score tends toward the maudlin in moments of close-up heartbreak, it feels right; like the film has finally given over fully to it's subject. 

Damon is both believable and miscast in the role of roughneck Bill. As Damon likes to do with his roles, he transformed through immersion, embedding himself with oil rig workers, nailing down their specific, tightly wound kinetic energy, accented perfectly by some Farm-and-Fleet costume design and a goatee. But, ultimately, I find this "acting as transformation" act to do a disservice to the story, in the sense that you're always watching Matt Damon act. I'm not saying he's not very good, because he is, but that faux-"method" style is tiresome, and I think an actor with fewer layers of celebrity to weed through might have made Stillwater feel even more authentic, naturalistic. After all, it is a sort of naturalism that McCarthy is doing some meta-commentary on mid-movie, in the scene where Bill--a man who, of course, doesn't go to the theatre--is goaded by Virginie to give some feedback on her performance in a play, and all he can muster is something about how he liked that "nobody moved like real people." Stillwater not only succeeds in immersing the viewer in the modern day reality of Marseilles, but in the American locations truly achieves an authentic feel for the mid-west and midwestern, working-class identity (unlike something like Martin McDonough's Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri, which feels as if no one involved had ever been anywhere near the mid-west). Stillwater's keen sense of American identity in relief against the racism and violence of a modern-day Marseilles is the heart of the film, and I appreciate that wrapped inside of this unusually shaped and engaging narrative is an examination of that that doesn't judge these characters and remains fairly free of any prescribed ideology.

Finally, it needs to be said that the film is not free from it's ties to the Amanda Knox scandal. I am not a follower of true crime, so (as unlikely as it might seem to some readers) I had zero knowledge of the scandal going into the film. Afterward, curious in regard to headlines that Amanda Knox has criticized the film for profiting off of her story, I viewed the 2016 documentary Amanda Knox , which is worth a look if you want some perspective on her story. It's clear to me that Stillwater has an unfortunate relationship to the Knox story, because the heart of McCarthy's film really has little to do with Knox, yet has undeniably, inextricably borrowed elements from her story. I'll leave it to those more invested in the Knox saga to define the relationship between the two for me (comments are always open below), though I imagine it will cause some to disregard the film entirely, which I think would be unfortunate, since it is clearly attempting to speak to themes beyond the Knox story, and not really trying to tell that story at all. From the filmmaker who went into such journalistic detail in relation to true events with his last major film, this may leave Stillwater with a complicated reception.

The Green Knight dir David Lowery

David Lowery's new film The Green Knight is a personal movie that will undoubtedly divide audiences, leaving a complicated conversation in it's wake. The trailer for the film has gotten some heavy play recently, promising the fantasy adventure epic of the summer. While The Green Knight cuts perfectly into a trailer for a crowd-pleasing fantasy film that promises the kind of cinematic grandeur that would serve as the perfect antidote to the summertime blues, it is decidedly not that. For me, the disparity between the trailer and the film itself is just as interesting as the film, and the audience reaction to the screening I attended yielded at least one entertaining post-screening gripe--you know, the kind that's said once the disgruntled audience member has ambled to a position in front of the credit readers, just loud enough to be heard: "I can't get out of here fast enough." So, is The Green Knight an alienating grift, or a dense treatise challenging textual authority and the quest for moral certitude? I think it's more interesting read as both of these, and then some.

As for Lowery's previous films, I quite liked 2018's The Old Man and the Gun and 2016's A Ghost Story, and while their modest production value doesn't necessarily hint at a follow-up on the scale of The Green Knight (likely modest in budget for a fantasy epic), A Ghost Story, particularly, displays an adept experimentation with time and duration that definitely gets expanded on in The Green Knight. Lowery gained notoriety with a small film in 2013 called Ain't Them Bodies Saints, which read as a young director playing in interesting ways with the Bonnie and Clyde archetype while also aping the cinematic style of Terrance Malick, not unlike early David Gordon Green (George Washington, All the Real Girls). Aspiring to the heights of Malick is certainly no crime, and Lowery is working off of even more similarly lofty influences here--from Dreyer to Kubrick to Coppola (Francis and Sophia)--but even with The Green Knight garnering so much comparison to Malick, Lowery still has yet to make anything quite as accomplished. But, he's still pretty young, and what's exciting about what Lowery shares with Malick is a sense of transforming genre frameworks, comparable to Malick's masterful take on the "war movie" genre, The Thin Red Line, as well as the shared experimental ambitions of films like The Tree of Life and To the Wonder. More accurately (and with strange titular coincidence) The Green Knight, perhaps, falls more in rank with something like Malick's Knight of Cups: utterly compelling despite it's unruly and flawed elements. 

No, the entirety of The Green Knight didn't immediately work for me, as with the odd "talking fox" scene late in the film, but by that point I felt the case for it's own rhythms and strangeness had been made, and I was a happy traveler for the remainder of the journey. It helps that as a writer/director Lowery is confident enough to own his singular, cinematic voice, and The Green Knight is so purely a film of cinematic pleasures that it nearly feels, at times, to be about the medium itself, dense plays of light and shadow defining every part of the quest. Lowery revels in playing with ambiguities, mysterious character doubling, and textual tangents. When it comes to the original text--the summer smash of...let's say 1400: "Sir Gawain and the Green Night," Lowery freely embellishes the knight's tale with various cinematic references and parallel folk tales, or sometimes sprouts whole new scenes out of small spaces of indeterminacy. For certain, there will be those who will get frustrated by the blasé attitude Lowery takes to the idea of the "faithful adaptation," but the film has already begun in a place that is searching beyond that kind of blind faith. Lowery's film--and it is certainly his, from script to production to directing to editing--is also one of the darkest, confounding movies in recent memory (I mean that literally--the cinematography is among the darkest I've seen, to the extent that I'm anxious to see another screening to detect whether or not the projectionist was just having an off day). The effect is one I ultimately settled into, that of peering into the dim past through layers of interpretation and history after having ingested some strange mushrooms, which our questing hero--played with the precariously balanced countenance of a true Everyman by Dev Patel--unknowingly imbibes about mid-movie, sending the film into one of many strange stretches of audio/visual flight, never quite clearly defining where the psychological subjectivity or surreal encounters begin or end, despite the textual chapter markings. It also has a keen sense of humor, ultimately landing on a philosophical punchline that will either delight or annoy. In the end, the fantasy I carry out of the film with me is that The Green Knight inspires a new resurgence of midnight movies, projected  through the haze in triple bills that include the likes of Ken Russel, John Boorman, and Alejandro Jodorowsky--that's the shelf this film belongs on. Throw in a few of the new, psychotronic pioneers, as well: Panos Cosmatos, Cattet and Forzani, Brandon Cronenberg--and from the A24 stable that produced Lowery, Ari Aster and Robert Eggers. 

I wouldn't be the first to note that we live in a communication age where the conversation about movies is at a quantitative peak, while the quality of that conversation feels like it's at an all-time, superficial low, lacking any substance beyond compulsively generated discussions of authenticity, representation, influences, and easter eggs. I can't say I won't delight a bit in seeing an ambitious and truly strange movie like The Green Knight land with a splat against the entitled sensibility of this modern audience, all too eager to express their disappointment at anything that fails to behave in the prescribed way it was marketed to them. But, more important than the reactionary side-show, it feels like the type of film that truly has the potential to jar something in that same audience, and not just in regards to reading the original text. While it's nice to think that a few kids will possibly crack a book as a result of seeing The Green Knight, the power of a film in such a unique mode of ecstatic risk could be of use to a generation of kids so pummeled with didacticism in their storybooks, films, and TV that one wonders if they would even recognize or engage with a productive ambiguity if they saw it. For instance, what happens after the final frame of The Green Knight? I'm afraid it might be read as the lack of a moral, rather than the beginning of a conversation. And while I wasn't in love with every aspect of this possibly pretentious, definitely challenging film, I couldn't get out of the theatre fast enough to talk about it.

(Special thanks to my frequent movie-going friend Elyse -- she fell a bit more on the "annoyed" than "delighted" side of the spectrum post-screening, but the conversation on the journey home was, as always, exceptional)