Hard not to root for this Father-Love story to work.* Just the sort of mid-list feature once common, now all but impossible to get funded. It’s no big tent pole pic, micro-budgeted cult item or the latest in some expanding franchise, so a real pleasure to watch this one take off so nicely, only to wince as it crashes & burns on its third act reentry. (Difficult to know how it performed what with COVID still in the air & streaming data the usual mystery.) The film tees up on (but largely stays clear of) the tragic Italian murder trial of American Amanda Knox*, but is set in Marseilles. Matt Damon (excellent) is Dad, the Oklahoma construction worker who goes to France to visit his daughter, incarcerated for a murder she didn’t commit. Finding no help from her attorney, he starts investigating on his own. And the pleasure of the opening two acts largely stems from how co-writer/director Tom McCarthy and Damon (a very hands-on star) work to avoid all the usual prickly French/Ugly American tropes using a Based-on-a-True-Story template for this pure fiction. Structurally, the investigation hits a wall and the second act is all personal relations: Dad & wary daughter (Abigail Breslin) and between Damon and Camille Cottin’s single mom with a little girl (Lilou Siauvand). For Damon, this is like a double helping of second chances: reconnecting with his own daughter, plus having a shot at the family he missed out on back in the States. It's the best thing in the film, but throws McCarthy completely off his game so when he attempts to restart the investigation he's painted himself into a dramatic corner. Far-fetched coincidence now runs the plot; Damon’s actions are out of character; and a final twist, an unconvincing ‘got’cha’ moment, plays out like Hollywood film conventions from an earlier decade. You can almost hear James Stewart telling Kim Novak, ‘You shouldn’t have been so sentimental, you shouldn't have been so sentimental.' (That from a great, but entirely different kind of movie.) Pity.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Hollywood Mother Love dramas a dime a dozen going back to the 1920s. (It’s how Louis B. Mayer got his start in Hollywood.) Father Love far less prevalent.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *HULU about to go into production on a limited series about the case, AMANDA.
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