Message movies aren’t supposed to be good. They’re supposed to heavy-handedly whack you over the head with whatever cause they’re promoting at the expense of everything else. Such is not the case with Promised Land, a surprisingly appealing and well-acted message movie directed by Gus Van Sant and co-scripted by stars Matt Damon and John Krasinski.
The cause in question is fracking, the controversial process used to extract natural gas from deep underground. Damon’s character works for a large energy company, and is one of their best at getting land owners to sign over drilling rights. But he hits a wall of resistance in a struggling Pennsylvania farming town, where Krasinski’s environmentalist campaigns against his efforts.
As writers, Damon and Krasinski (both anti-fracking advocates) do their level best to argue both sides of the issue. They cast Damon’s employee not as an evil man, just someone who himself grew up in a farming community that went bust and who truly wants to help other such communities from suffering a similar fate.
Conversely, Krasinski recounts to a crowd of locals how a farm where he grew up was a victim of fracking, shows us pictures of dead cows and talks to Rosemarie DeWitt’s middle school class about the technique, purposely setting a model farm on fire in the process. To add insult to injury, he starts romancing the fetching DeWitt, whom Damon has also been eyeing.
What makes this your better-than-average message flick, then, is the genuine farming-town atmosphere Van Sant fosters, the natural performances he draws from his actors and the humor Damon and Krasinski insert into their script. Damon, in particular, is very strong playing a good person who honestly believes in what he is doing and struggles when those beliefs are challenged.
A lot of the humor is courtesy of the excellent Frances McDormand as Damon’s partner in the field. She creates a genuine person, flirting with Titus Welliver’s store owner and eliciting chuckles by pointing out how those horses over there are so small. Her prickly interplay with Damon is perhaps the film’s best feature (and their rental car being a stick-shift a great recurring joke).
Now, I’m not a fool. I know that every single thing that goes on here is geared toward making us think a certain way about fracking, and that a third-act plot twist is a cop-out that allows Damon a too-easy way out of his moral quandary. But by that point, I think, the film has made its argument(s) effectively while also allowing us to visit with an interesting group of people, including a farmer played, in very fine form, by 88-year-old Hal Holbrook. – [DVD]
Drama
Rated R
DVD Release Date: 4/23/13