DAMON ECO-FILM ‘DE-FRACKED’
Promised Land offers healthy dose of ambivalence
Ethical quiz: Which is better, spending billions on foreign oil or blowing dubious chemicals into the local earth to extract the natural gas trapped there? It’s called hydraulic fracturing — “fracking” is the unaffectionate shorthand — and as gas company executive Steve Butler (Matt Damon) says in the drama Promised Land, “If you are against this, you are for coal and oil.”
It’s an interesting moral dilemma that Promised Land discovers, courts and then leaves standing at the altar, unresolved and unfracked, as it were.
This is a film that teases us with both sides of a controversial issue and then throws in some last-minute reversals that ensure it never really has to answer them.
Promised Land comes with impeccable credentials: it’s written by Damon and his co-star John Krasinski (The Office) from an idea by Mc- Sweeney’s editor Dave Eggers, and it’s directed by Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting).
It’s safe to say all of them regard hydraulic fracturing with the same warmth that Greenpeace looks at the seal hunt, but for a while they do try to play fair.
Steve — whom Damon portrays with his familiar combination of aggressive accomplishment and nice-guy naiveté — works for something called Global Crosspower Solutions. Along with colleague Sue (Frances McDormand, trying heroically to create a full-bodied person out of three personality tics and a recalcitrant truck), they are touring rural America trying to get hard-up farmers to sell them gas leases. They promise that millions lie beneath the soil with little danger in extracting it, a fiction that Steve seems to believe with unlikely sincerity.
But there is opposition. Local science teacher Frank (Hal Holbrook, beginning to look a bit like Whistler’s Mother) has rallied the farmers to oppose fracking. “All we have to do to get it is be willing to scorch the earth under our feet,” he muses. And an environmentalist with the heightened name of Dustin Noble (Krasinski) comes to town with all sorts of horror stories about dead cattle, ruined land and dashed hopes.
It’s a fable of good versus evil, except that Damon and Krasinski have written a story that’s not quite that easy. Many of the locals welcome the gas company money; indeed, a local politician makes it clear that he’ll be wanting a lucrative handout for his support. Steve himself is a farm boy who saw the agricultural economy sink when the local tractor factory closed: he thinks he’s the future. “I’m not selling them natural gas,” he says. “I’m selling them the only way they have to get back.”
Promised Land lays out the tricky crossroads with a welcome note of ambivalence, even if it’s clear from the start the American values — the old virtues of hard work as opposed to the new virtues of spewing chemicals all over everything and becoming a millionaire in the process — it will espouse. Some of the good guys are violent. Some of the greedy villains are sympathetic.
It hardly matters, however, in a story that solves the problem with a tricky twist that seems pretty unlikely to fool a bunch of sensible farmers. Promised Land eventually loads the dice — and maybe it should, since natural gas companies have enough people standing up for them — and throws in a romance as a kind of distraction from all the energy issues it raises.
That comes in the person of the pretty and convivial Rosemarie DeWitt as Alice, a teacher whose affections seem to be moving between Steve and Dustin as their arguments lose and gain strength.
Pretty and convivial teachers would inevitably prefer an environmentalist over a gas company salesman, but on the other hand, we’ve been raised on movies in which bigcity sharpies come to rural America to be educated in truth and decency, and this doesn’t look like the kind of film that is going to suddenly discover the nobility of hydraulic fracturing.
In the end, Promised Land is something of a land grab itself. It’s what happens when a bunch of smart people come to town trying to sell us something. It sounds good, but why are they trying to buy us off with the love story?