Promised Land – directed by Gus Van Sant. Drama. Two oil salespeople interlope a Pennsylvania farm town to sign it up for oil fracking, and come up against an informed populace and a charming environmentalist. 106 minutes Color 2012.
★★★★
Everything else is decor. There are three elements in a movie. The acting, the story, the narration. And here’s a film you really want to root for.
The acting is impeccable. Matt Damon is one of the few actors who can actually mull on camera. He can transfer from a likeable hero to a likeable wretch in the same role and you go with for the ride. He is the most useful actor in films today. Frances McDormand, belovèd of all, has an inner humor and heart that is staunch in all dire straights. John Krasinsky is masterfully fluid and appealing here, and if I have never seen him before, I would be interested to see him again. We have Hal Holbrook – when has he ever wronged us? – while Rosemarie DeWitt upgrades every scene she is in.
Gus Van Sant’s direction of all this is balanced, easy on the eyes, sure. His sense of place gives us town and farm scenes that make us confident that we are there.
And the story? Ah, the story. It is like Frank Capra’s State Of The Union with Matt Damon playing Spencer Tracy. It’s the story of a man setting out on a worthy course, only to be seduced by his own rhetoric. And it would work – but it has a trick ending, and trick endings o’erset everything as a rule, including the audience’s faith in what they have just committed their trust to.
The issue of every story is: How do you get out of this predicament? But the problem here is divided predicament. Is the predicament how inconscionable large corporations are? That is to say, will Matt Damon realize he mustn’t continue in his career because corporations are wicked and manipulative?
Or is the predicament, how can he be gotten to see that fracking is poisonous and that he should not embrace a career that promotes it?
The answer to the second is that the Matt Damon character should already know that fracking kills water tables, long before he gets to Pennsylvania; he is 38, after all. Or is he a dope? – which is not the way he is presented. As to the corporations, the trick ending leaves us in no uncertainty about that. But that is a trick to cover a defect of focus. The trick ending shatters our credulity, and in our betrayal such questions snap to the surface, where they should never arise at all.
Damon and Kasinsky produced the picture as well as wrote it and stared in it, so there was no way such questions could snap to the surface of them. They lost us because they were lost. The film would have been far more successful had it been much less pat, more at loose ends. Does Matt really regain his manhood just so that he can walk into the arms of Rosemarie DeWitt at the end? Is that all there is: a hardon? What does he do then? Raise chickens? Children? Cain? Well, that too is unanswerable. As to the film? Well, I liked it, but, obviously, oh, I wish I had liked it better.