Promised Land

Synopsis: Steve Butler (Matt Damon) and his co-worker Sue (Frances McDormand) arrive in a small farming community to lease farmers land for natural gas exploration. They run afoul of Frank Yates (Hal Holbrook) a local science teacher who understands the dangers of the fracking process they employ, and then an environmentalist named Dustin (John Krasinski) shows up as well.

For the bulk of this film, I felt like I was being preached at. That’s the great problem of issue films, no matter how well they dramatise their concerns, you’re being pitched information rather than story. But it’s information worth considering, so given this sort of thing is going on in Gippsland as we speak (thank you kind stranger/activist dude who cornered me after the screening) it’s worth at least a watch for that.

Van Sant and team do a good job of covering the complexities of the issue: on the one hand, dirt poor farmers whose way of life is only getting harder with less opportunity every day, on the other, the need for energy and a belief (whose soundness I question) that gas is cleaner than coal or oil. But they also show how they get the gas, drilling into the ground, pumping chemicals in to help the drill, and what can happen to the land when it goes wrong. Then again, you can get pretty much all of this by watching Josh Fox’s 2010 documentary Gasland.

I do admire the film for not going the obvious route of a corporate guy being won over by small-town charm. He isn’t and his contempt for people unwilling to have a crack at wht he regards as something something better is generally well played, as is his underlying motivation for the attitude. But the finale is a bit underwhelming, though there’s a bit of intrigue that I thought was clever enough so I won’t go into it here.

It ain’t gonna change the world, but if you’re curious about fracking and you’d rather watch a dramatisation on cruise-control rather than sit through a documentary, Promised Land has you covered.

 

 

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