Bill is a hard part to pull off, but Damon does, creating a flawed but compassionate character, made doubly hard since he outwardly reveals little emotion. Damon plays him with a haunted sadness, unfailingly polite (“yes, ma’am”) and devout, honorable as long as you see things his way.
He is asked by the fascinated French if he owns guns and he does, two of ’em. He is asked if he voted for Donald Trump and he couldn’t — felons can’t vote. It’s a cute side-step of the issue, but there’s zero chance he was a Hillary backer.
The way Bill walks — stiffly, unyielding, almost martial — sticks out on the streets of Marseille. He wears high-waisted work jeans, steel-toed boots and a dusty baseball cap, listening to country and eating hamburgers and at a Subway sandwich shop even in France.
Can he change? Can he find grace? Those are the questions that constantly pop up in this overly long but thoughtful work. It opens with Bill carpooling with fellow tornado cleanup workers who marvel at why Americans always return to the site of their home’s destruction to rebuild.
“I don’t think Americans like to change,” one says. The rest of the film is a test of that observation, using a rare red state hero in a foreign land forced to examine how the world sees him. And the result? It’s sometimes ugly, Americans.
“Stillwater,” a Focus Features release that arrives in theaters July 30, is rated R for language and some violence. Running time: 140 minutes. Three stars out of four.
