139 min | R | July 30, 2021 | Focus Features
An Oklahoma roughneck flies to Marseille to spring his daughter from a French prison. He cannot speak the language, work the courts, or read the people he leans on. The investigation is bait, and the lonely man building a new life is the movie that actually shows up.
Bill Baker is an Oklahoma oil rig worker. He flies to Marseille to visit his daughter Allison, who sits in prison for the murder of her girlfriend. She insists she is innocent and hands him a lead. Bill sets out to clear her name in a country whose language he does not speak. The film looks like a crime thriller and then becomes something else. It is a study of an American man who fails at everything except the brute work of showing up.
Matt Damon plays Bill Baker stripped of charm. He gives him a stiff walk, a ball cap, and a faith he wears without comment. Damon makes the man’s decency and his limitations the same trait. Camille Cottin plays Virginie, a local actress who becomes Bill’s translator and then his partner, with warmth and impatience. Abigail Breslin plays Allison with resentment buried under need. Lilou Siauvaud plays Virginie’s young daughter Maya, and the scenes between her and Damon carry the film’s real tenderness.
Tom McCarthy directs from a script he wrote with Marcus Hinchey, Thomas Bidegain, and Noé Debré. He shoots Marseille as a working city, not a postcard. The camera stays close to Bill in cramped apartments and stadium crowds and follows him through neighborhoods the tourist brochures skip. McCarthy lets long stretches pass with no plot at all, building a domestic routine that the thriller mechanics keep interrupting. The patience is both the point and the liability. The film earns its quiet and then strains it with a third act that reaches for melodrama.
The film wants to be two movies at once. One is a patient character study about a man rebuilding a life he never planned, and the other is a thriller about clearing a daughter’s name. McCarthy commits to the first and keeps yanking back to the second, and the seams show. The story borrows its bones from a famous case and then bends them toward a resolution that asks too much. What survives is Damon’s face and the ordinary life Bill stumbles into. The investigation is the excuse and the man is the movie.