Gus Van Sant (2012)
Promised Land is the work of intelligent, talented people but it’s unsatisfying. You know very soon that it’s going to be because the film’s political point of view is so salient and unnuanced. This is the story of a big energy company’s attempts to buy land from the residents of a small rural community in Pennsylvania: Global Crosspower Solutions specialises in fracking and wants to secure drilling rights to release natural gas. You would bet against the makers of a film with this subject being on the side of the corporate giant and it’s not long before the two high-powered Global salespeople – Steve Butler (Matt Damon) and Sue Thomason (Frances McDormand) – are being embarrassed by determined and resourceful opponents, notably Frank Yates (Hal Holbrook), a retired engineer who now teaches science at the local high school, and Dustin Noble (John Krasinski), a young environmentalist who arrives in town to motivate a grass roots campaign against Global. Steve Butler in particular is repeatedly on the receiving end of slights and setbacks: it’s one-way traffic – you know there has to be a twist. The twist arrives: Dustin Noble works for Global too, and is executing a much more cunning plan than Steve could have imagined. Once you’ve absorbed this, you realise that Promised Land is still one-way traffic. Steve’s abhorrence of his employer’s tactics results in a morally improving change of heart and a self-congratulatory ending to the movie. For people who go to see it wanting to feel ethically vindicated it’s probably fine. For anyone after dramatic complexity or something challenging to your own views and prejudices, it’s tedious.
Steve Butler – a money maniac, smart-alecky and competitive in his every word and action – is not the kind of man I’d instinctively like. Yet I actually began to root for him because the cards of the script, which John Krasinski and Matt Damon co-wrote from a story by Dave Eggers, are so stacked against him. Alone in a bar late one night and depressed at how things aren’t going Global’s way, Steve is accosted by a group of locals. He stands his ground – at least he stays put on his bar stool – and tells the men why they should accept the offer for their land that’s been made. It will give them enough money to say ‘fuck you’ to the various financial challenges that they’ll otherwise face. The speech is a bit too rhetorically shaped but Matt Damon invests it with a blend of passion and showoff articulacy that’s compelling. When Steve reaches his climactic ‘Fuck you!’ it earns him a punch in the face and a bloody nose but that’s clearly no answer to his argument. He organises a fair, meant to ingratiate himself and Global with the community, which is washed out by suddenly atrocious weather: this is just about the last straw not only for Steve but for a viewer fed up with reverses for him. The kindly Frank Yates and his wife take pity on Steve and Sue and invite them for dinner. At the end of the meal, Frank asks the miserable Steve about his own background.
We’ve known from the start that Steve himself is from a farming community that died. Damon communicates well in the conversation with the Yateses – in a register very different from that of the speech in the bar – Steve’s enduring belief that he was right to get away from his roots and his emotionally charged contempt for people in similar circumstances who, in his view, are too blinkered to see what’s good for them. This is the interesting thing about Steve and what makes his eventual Damascene conversion so tritely disappointing. As soon as he arrived in Pennsylvania, he put on a pair of sturdy boots inherited from his grandfather who worked the land. The footwear is meant to show what’s in his soul – that Steve, once a country boy, is therefore always a country boy. This is quite unconvincing: it’s incredible that his disgust at Global’s unscrupulous greed is enough to obliterate his deep-seated conviction that this kind of community’s way of life is inherently moribund.
Promised Land looks to be inspired by Local Hero but in its essential aspects turns out to be the opposite of Bill Forsyth’s film. Peter Riegert’s Mac in Local Hero, although someone else is always one step ahead of him, is never made to look a complete fool. Also, he’s stressed and rumpled from the start. Steve Butler, in contrast, is super self-possessed in the early scenes; as a result, once he’s exposed as fallible (and that’s quite early on) he’s fatally weakened. Mac’s enchantment by the Scottish village of Ferness – a world he’s never experienced before – confirms his disillusion with his life and work in Houston, Texas yet he has to return to his soul-destroying corporate job in America. The story of Promised Land returns Steve to an environment he already knows and fears and comes to love again. He ends up with Alice (Rosemarie DeWitt), the local schoolteacher he’s had his eye on from an early stage; in Local Hero, Mac had to say goodbye to Stella, the wife of the multi-tasking Gordon Urquhart. Denis Lawson’s Gordon is canny and mercenary but at peace with himself and his life in Ferness; Mac’s ambivalence towards Gordon – they work together to try and seal the oil deal but there’s an unspoken tension because of Mac’s growing feelings for Stella – is one of the many fascinations of Local Hero. In Promised Land the rivalry between Dustin Noble and Steve Butler for a date with Alice is on the surface. Dustin connects with the locals – not because he’s one of them, as Gordon is in Ferness, but because he’s an accomplished fake. Steve and Sue’s hired car that repeatedly won’t start compares poorly with the eccentricity of Bill Forsyth’s running jokes. The crucial difference between the two movies is that, while greed is an important element of Local Hero, it’s subsidiary to larger characterisation of the people and their habitat, and Forsyth isn’t remotely censorious of anyone in the story. With Promised Land it’s otherwise – you can tell from the title the movie means business in a moralising way – and the lack of essential humour robs it of charm. Gus Van Sant and the cinematographer Linus Sandgren give the landscapes a muted bleakness which is eyecatching but a little monotonous too.
Van Sant orchestrates the cast very well. The first half of Promised Land in particular is distinguished by just about flawless naturalistic acting all round; and, though they eventually succumb to speechifying, John Krasinski and Matt Damon have written plenty of dialogue to match the playing. The trouble is that the single-mindedness of the script gradually reduces the effect of this – the good acting takes place in a vacuum. Damon, although occasionally too eager to show Steve coming off worse, has a core of intelligence which is very effective here. This quality can be tiresome if he’s playing a character shown to be in the right but it stops Steve Butler from being a totally obvious butt of jokes. The different presences of the two leading men chime with their characters’ reception in the community. John Krasinski has an exuberant charm that Matt Damon lacks. He uses it to take the audience, as well as the locals, in: the fact that Krasinski’s charm has a slightly practised quality makes good sense when Dustin Noble’s true identity is revealed. Although Frank Yates is a tedious conception, Hal Holbrook’s real-life seniority (he had his eighty-eighth birthday in February this year) helps to transcend it. The supporting cast also includes Scoot McNairy, Ken Strunk and Titus Welliver but the most persuasive performances in Promised Land come from the two main women. There’s a frankness to Frances McDormand’s Sue which registers at different levels – it’s reflected in her straightforwardness as a corporate negotiator, in her plain speaking to Steve, in Sue’s lack of make-up and of pretence about her age. The contrast between Steve’s driven approach to his work and Sue’s seeing her job with Global as just that – a job – sounds too neat but Frances McDormand’s wit and truthfulness stop it from playing that way. The revelation is Rosemarie DeWitt as Alice. She’s really excellent at expressing – through her lovely, often brittle smiles and her agile, funny vocal inflections – Alice’s ambivalence towards Steve. You believe that she can’t help but be attracted to him, and infuriated by him too.
24 April 2013
