Sue Thomason: Frances McDormand
Dustin Nobel: John Krasinski
Alice: Rosemarie DeWitt
Rob: Titus Welliver
Gerry Richards: Ken Strunk
Paul Geary: Lucas Black
Frank Yates: Hal Holbrook
Focus Features presents a
film directed by Gus Van Sant. Written by John Krasinski & Matt Damon and
Dave Eggers. Running time: 106 min. Rated R (for language).
If you haven’t seen the
trailers, you won’t know exactly what it is that Matt Damon’s character Steven
Butler does from the opening scenes of his new film “Promised Land”. You will
learn that he is a sort of salesman who closes three times as many deals as his
fellow employees at half the rates to the company for which he works. He’s part
of a two-person team, with the down-to-Earth Sue Thomason, which goes into
farming communities and leases land from farmers for his company to use to
extract natural gas from the shale beneath the ground. Steven believes what he
does for these communities helps them survive hard economic times.
The process of extracting
natural gas in this manner is called fracking. Up until just recently, I
thought fracking was what people did on the television series “Battlestar
Galactica” to make children. In reality, it is a practice that has existed for
over fifty years in the natural gas industry. As pressures to pursue
alternative energy sources have mounted over the past few years and the
popularity of natural gas has increased, this practice has come under fire from
environmental agencies. They claim that the mixing of dangerous chemicals with
water used in the process combined with the process itself of saturating the
soil with this mixture to apply pressure to the shale to release the natural
gases puts the surface soil and water at risk for contamination.
Butler knows these instances
are rare. “I’m not a bad guy,” he insists. He has personal experience with the
fading rural farming communities in this country. He knows that without some
sort of economical push to the farming community he is assigned, the town will
eventually die. For the most part, the town’s people are willing to buy into
his scheme. Most see a financial opportunity that even in the best of
economical times they’d never see. Some even wish to exploit the gas company.
There’s a keenly observant scene where the mayor tries to extort a little
finder’s fee from the gas man. He’s excited and nervous until he’s slapped down
by the experience behind Steven’s sales tactics.
There are a few, however,
who see more than just money behind the natural gas deal. They see a grave
threat to their way of life and their environment. A retirement-aged gentleman,
played by the always-levelheaded Hal Holbrook, is more than he seems and
derails Steven’s plans to push easy permission from the town for the drilling
rights. Then the “environmental presence” shows up. Played with John
Krasinski’s boyish charm and playfulness, Dustin Nobel throws a giant wrench
into the works with a story about his family farm perishing due to a natural
gas deal. Nothing that Steven throws up against Dustin’s golly gee tactics
seems to work. This is where the movie started to loose me.
Suddenly this guy—who is
supposed to the best in the game—looks like he’s playing the amateur hour to a
goofball who can’t possibly be throwing anything at them that they haven’t seen
before. Steven makes much about the fact that his company is a $9 billion
dollar company, and yet for some reason when this one man show turns up they
start spinning their wheels and don’t seem to have any resources to fall back
on besides Steven’s inferior wit and Sue’s matter of fact attitude. Why aren’t
they demanding information on this guy, or lawyers, or fixers from their
company? In fact, Sue’s purpose seems to be regulated to showing the audience
how they should feel about certain developments and providing a little bit of
comic relief from a flirtation she has with a local. I’m not sure why she’s
there.
Where is Steven’s ferocity?
Where is his passion for what he claims to believe is the right thing for the
town? He spends far too much time questioning his position, and not enough time
fighting for it in a way that makes us believe this man is the character he’s
been set up to be. It’s as if Damon and Krasinski with their screenplay are
trying too hard to sell this guy as the hero. They want us to like him. He
should think he’s a hero, but not the introspective thoughtful kind. He should
have that gung ho, never say die spirit that everybody thinks is what makes a
hero, so that at the end his epiphany might seem more profound.
The film is well directed by
veteran filmmaker Gus Van Sant, who has directed Damon in a Damon co-written screenplay
on two previous occasions, “Good Will Hunting” and “Gerry”. The project was
intended to be Damon’s directorial debut, but scheduling conflicts required the
production to bring in an outside director. Van Sant does a good job capturing
the small town farming community, but perhaps he didn’t have the passion for
the fracking message that Damon and Krasinski were trying to educate people on.
The performances are all
spot on. Damon is a good hero. Possibly too good for this role. Perhaps Damon’s
childhood friend Ben Affleck might’ve been a better choice, however, I doubt
anybody would believe that Affleck grew up on a farm. Krasinski is perfect for
the environmentalist, including certain against “type” aspects that I won’t
reveal here. Frances McDormand is the rock steady presence she always is. Her
knack for comedy helps lighten the mood a good deal. Even the smaller roles capture
exactly what they should about a small town, right down to a small role played
by Lucas Black as that over enthusiastic redneck that seems ever-present in any
small town.
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