Promised Land
For his first time as a writer since he won an Oscar for “Good Will Hunting,” Matt Damon reunites with that film’s director (Gus Van Sant) for a modern day morality tale about a salesman who has a crisis of conscious. His Steve Butler works for a major natural gas company, and is sent to a rural community in Pennsylvania with his partner, Sue (Frances McDormand). Their job is to sell the town on letting his company lease their land, so that the company can drill for natural gas, revitalizing the town’s economy, and making a tiny profit for the company. He finds it a difficult sell, however, when an old farmer named Frank Yates (Hal Holbrook) interrupts a town hall, and brings up the controversial drilling process known as fracking. The town decides to put the measure to a vote, and it isn’t long before an environmentalist (played by John Krasinski, who co-wrote the script with Damon) comes to town, trying to sway public opinion against going along with the company.
The story is by Dave Eggers, who last surfaced in moviemaking with his scripts for “Away We Go” (starring Krasinski) and “Where the Wild Things Are,” and that same perceptive, character-driven voice is alive and well in Damon and Krasinski’s screenplay. Fracking has become one of the central issues of the environmental movement the past few years, as more and more, people are seeing negative effects from its use as we try to become more and more dependent on energy besides coal and oil, and “Promised Land” is smart to raise the issue, and focus on the effects it could have on the people. Van Sant (“Milk,” “Drugstore Cowboy”) doesn’t do anything flashy, and just lets the actors– all terrific –do the heavy-lifting. The film oozes with self-importance, but when it centers on the moral dilemmas of the characters, it is a smart, emotional moviewatching experience.
