'Stillwater'

Matt Damon became a star by playing the title role in "Good Will Hunting," a troubled young man who occasionally knew all the answers, when he wasn't getting into needless fights.

In "Stillwater," however, Damon's Bill Baker finds himself in a situation that even Will Hunting or Jason Bourne would have difficulty solving.

Bill is a former oil-rig worker who now makes pocket money cleaning up disaster sites. There's a lull in the petroleum market, so these jobs are about the best he can hope for. One reason he could use some extra cash is that his daughter Allison (Abigail Breslin) is languishing in a French prison near Marseille.

Bill has more than fatherly love to support his belief that Allison didn't kill her French girlfriend. She contends that a mysterious fellow was the real murderer, but the local cops couldn't find him, and she doesn't even know his last name. With a DNA match, Allison could return home exonerated.

While the facts might be on Allison's side, the Gallic legal system is unmoved. Even Allison's defense attorney thinks finding the mystery man and getting his genetic material is a long shot and won't bother to help any further.

So Bill becomes an amateur detective.

While he has successfully ignored the siren call of alcohol, which got him in trouble back in Oklahoma, he's ill suited for locating clues that can get his daughter out of the big house. He knows only a few isolated words of French and barges into dangerous neighborhoods that the police avoid.

Still, when the law in the United States and France seems indifferent, his bumbling becomes oddly logical if potentially regrettable.

In some ways, it's easy to follow Bill's search for the truth because he's not a genius and he's out of his depth. Damon plays him as a flawed, misguided but ultimately sympathetic man. Bill is ignorant about what life is like in the contemporary south of France, but his willingness to learn and even fall in love with his surroundings is commendable.

Masanobu Takayanagi's gorgeous cinematography doesn't hurt.

Co-writer-director Tom McCarthy ("Spotlight") doesn't flinch from depicting the challenges of finding justice. He also demonstrates that vigilantes often create more problems than they solve.

While finding the killer might drive the plot of "Stillwater," the movie revels in Marseilles and its culture. Bill gets some help from a French actress and activist named Virginie (Camille Cottin), whose soft heart belies a wisdom about French streets that Bill is foolish to ignore. Bill also bonds with her daughter Maya (Lilou Siauvaud).

Siauvaud could have coasted on simply being cute, but she's got an astonishingly wide range for such a young performer, and she and McCarthy handle these scenes without piling on any needless sentiment.

If the French characters in "Stillwater" are three-dimensional, so are the Yanks. Bill and his family pray before meals, and you get a sense that Bill might have voted for Trump had he been eligible. His felony convictions keep him away from the ballot box. Nonetheless, McCarthy treats the residents of flyover country with a dignity that's sometimes lacking in Hollywood offerings.

Unlike "Hillbilly Elegy," which treated the residents of Appalachia as condescending and dreary, "Stillwater" sees hope and possible redemption for Bill and Allison even if they often stumble on their path toward it.

French actor Virginie (Camille Cottin) and her 8-year-old daughter Maya (Lilou Siauvaud) provide aid and comfort to Bill (Matt Damon), a red state oilfield worker who has come to Marseille to try to get his daughter out of jail in Tom McCarthy’s “Stillwater.”