It seems a tad ingenious to say it but this earnest movie that tries to take the moral high ground on the contentious issue of fracking is frankly boring. Never quite too sure to be a poignant lesson on an important environmental issue or just an entertaining story, it ends up taking the middle ground and leading you as high and dry as the poor homeowners in the town in the movie. Its all about Steve who never seems to stop repeating to everyone ‘I’m not a bad guy’ , and even though he has come to this small town just to buy up drilling for natural gas rights from all the landowners for bottom dollar, he’s not. He hailed from a farm himself and when the local Caterpillar Factory closed down, his small town died too. His message now is without the Gas Companies’s largesse, there will be no future in this deprived farming community too.
Sue his sidekick is a single mother who needs the income to put her son through school so she takes a more pragmatic approach to the job. When Frank an elderly local school teacher asks some awkward questions about the whole nature of the side effects caused by fracking, its Sue who remains calm and is prepared to deal with this upset. When Dustin an environmental activist shows up in town ready to fight the Gas Companies plans head on, Sue is ready to fight back whilst Steve’s convictions start to wan.
It’s a dirty fight for the hearts and minds of the locals as Dustin distributes flyers of dead cows and wrecked abandoned farms in other towns who allowed fracking. He and Steve are also competing for the affections of the same girl, Alice, a local schoolteacher (who they evidently think worth fighting over even though it seems rather odd that such a hot ‘catch’ has not already been snapped up).
The best part of the movie is the twist to the end of the story just as it is stuck in a quagmire, but even though it paints the Gas Company as an evil behemoth that is only concerned with its bottom line, it confusingly says that fracking is bad just sometimes, and then leaves us hanging there.
This Gus Van Sant directed movie was co-written by it’s two stars Matt Damon and John Krasinski. Even though Mr Damon has a Screenwriting Oscar on his shelf at home (‘Good Will Hunting’, also directed by Mr Van Sant), he is a much better actor than writer and is suitably convincing as the small town boy who should have never left and gone to the big city. Frances McDormand is always a sheer joy to watch, and here as Sue she injects some much need humor into the story even though she is far too sound and sensible to be swayed by the gentle flirtations of the local store keeper (wonderfully played by Titus Welliver). The acting is in fact the saving grace of the movie and is rounded off with Hal Holbrook as Frank, and Rosemarie Dewitt as everybody’s sweetheart Alice.
Promised Land was full of promises that it failed to deliver. Well-intentioned, and often sentimental, but it wont tell you any facts about fracking that you didnt know already.
Available on Amazon
★★★★★★
