Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: A patriotic pipeliner from the heartland of America must go to France to prove his daughter’s innocence, as she’s in prison for the murder of her Arab lover.
About: You may have heard me talking about this one in the newsletter. It’s directed by Tom McCarthy (Spotlight) and stars Matt Damon. The movie is coming out in July.
Writers: Thomas Bidegain | Noé Debré | Marcus Hinchey (screenplay) and Tom McCarthy
Details: 122 pages
One of the obstacles you’re faced with when writing an “adult” movie is deciding how much of the Hollywood formula you want to ditch and how much you want to keep. Traditional story mechanics (a beginning, middle, end, GSU, conflict, drama, etc.) will work across all demographics.
But there is something to be said about muting commonly used components to make adult stories feel more realistic. It’s always a question of how much muting do you want to do. Because, at a certain point, you start eating into the drama. You start eating into the conflict. That’s the dilemma that today’s script faces. In its pursuit of realism, it dances with some decidedly non-dramatic choices. Let’s see how it turned out.
50 year old Bill Sedowski is a pipeliner. He’s the guy who digs into the earth and literally lays oil pipe, as American a job as someone can have. And that’s appropriate for Bill because he’s a hardcore American, the kind of guy who prays before every meal and doesn’t buy a cap unless it has the American flag on it.
So we see the fish-out-of-water contrast right away when Bill lands in Marseilles, France. It takes us a few scenes to realize why he’s here but we eventually learn his daughter, Allison, has been in prison for five years for the murder of her lover, an Arab girl named Lina. Bill heads over to the prison to see his daughter, something we realize he’s done dozens of times before. But this time she gives him a letter and says to please hand it directly to her lawyer, who isn’t talking to Allison anymore.
Bill does as told, trapping the squirrelly lawyer at the courthouse, who reads the letter (it’s in French) and tells Bill that she can’t help and that Allison needs to accept what she’s done. Nice lawyer! When Bill gets back to the hotel, he runs into a kind young woman named Virginie, who’s staying next to him, and he asks her to translate the letter for him.
It turns out that someone overheard some kids talking at a party and a dude named Mika was bragging that he killed Lina. Allison was hoping her lawyer could match his DNA against the crime scene. When Bill visits his daughter the next day, she asks, hopefully, if her lawyer accepted. Seeing the desperation in her eyes, Bill chooses to tell his daughter that the lawyer did accept. She’s going to look into it.
That now means, of course, that Bill will have to look into it. It’ll be up to him to find this Mika character. No small task considering he doesn’t even speak the language of the country. Bill finds some help in the girl who translated the letter for him, Virginie. She becomes his translator on this mission and off they go, determined to prove Allison’s innocence.
Let’s talk about some of these unconventional choices I alluded to in the introduction.
The first is coming into the story very late. In a traditional Hollywood movie, we’d show the events that led to the murder or wake up the night after the murder. From there, we’d watch the whirlwind unfold, requiring the father to fly from America and try to save his daughter.
But Stillwater starts a good FIVE YEARS into the process. That’s how long Allison has been in prison already.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. With movies, you’re always looking for situations that create a natural ticking time bomb, or at least some level of urgency. If you start the movie the day after the murder, for example, there’s a ticking time bomb in that the media and police are looking to charge Allison. That gives you a limited amount of time to prove her innocence.
By coming into the story so late, there is no urgency. She’s already in prison. Anything Bill doesn’t achieve now, he can try again in a week, a month, six months. That’s not ideal in storytelling. You want there to be an “all or nothing” component to achieving the goal. If Hero doesn’t achieve X by Y amount of time, he never gets another shot.
When movies move away from this, it’s usually because they want to “de-Hollywoodize” the storytelling so it feels more authentic. Seeing as Tom McCarthy threw all drama out the window to make Spotlight as realistic as possible, I’m not surprised he’s doing the same thing here.
The surprising thing is that, for the most part, it works. The reason for that is the characters. One of the best ways to deepen a story is to explore a broken relationship, usually within a family. But you can’t cheat. It can’t be bargain basement Tuesday backstory “Daddy didn’t hug me” stuff. It’s got to have some depth to it and some specificity, so it feels like there’s a real past here. And you need a little luck. You can do all this stuff right and for whatever reason it doesn’t work.
The part that hooked me in this relationship was when Bill was having Virginie translate the letter his daughter wrote (the letter is in French). Here is the last paragraph: “I am innocent of this crime and I have no one else to advocate for me in this situation. My mother is dead. My Grandmother can no longer make the trips to Marseille and you know my father. I would not trust him with this. He is not capable. You are my only hope.”
I mean how much more heartbreaking can you get than a daughter who doesn’t believe her father is capable of helping her? And that’s what sets up the compelling goal of the story, which is Bill trying to do the very thing that his daughter doesn’t think he can. But it isn’t just that. Bill’s not trying to prove his daughter wrong. He wants to save her. In the process, if he can, he’ll also get his daughter to believe in him again.
That’s why I wanted to stick around for this ride. I wanted to see if Bill could both save and win his daughter back. That’s when a screenplay really works, is when the reader is more invested in the character side of the goal than the plot side of the goal. In other words, you could’ve written this exact same movie but with a blander family backstory and still had that satisfying moment when the father proves his daughter’s innocence. But it works so much better when we feel the emotion of that actually mattering for the future of these characters.
In classic McCarthy fashion, he plays with storytelling fire, at one point jumping forward in the story FOUR MONTHS. When you do this, you erase all tension that you’ve built up so I highly advise against it. But the story is saved, once again, when the murder mystery returns to the script’s pole position and we learn what really happened that night. It’s quite the ending.
I don’t know if anyone under the age of 40 is going to like this movie. But the people who love to show up for those Clint Eastwood matinees are going to love it. :)
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: This is a clever way of exploiting a well-known murder story, as this is obviously based on the Amanda Knox case. You can do this to come up with some good ideas of your own. You simply take an interesting real-life murder case (or any popular story in the news) and look for an emotional component to it and tell the story from that angle. You could have told the Amanda Knox story a number of ways. You could have told it through the point of view of Amanda. You could’ve told it through the point of view of the lawyer trying to get her off. You could’ve told the story in third person and cut back and forth between all of the main players. Today’s writers took the route of exploring what it would’ve been like to be the father of a girl accused of murder in another country. That’s what allows them to get away with, basically, stealing a well-known murder story.
