Promised Land (2012)
Directed by Gus Van Sant
A salesman for a natural gas company experiences life-changing events after arriving in a small town, where his corporation wants to tap into the available resources.
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More “Local Hero” with sass than “Erin Brockovich” with gas, “Promised Land” is directed by Gus Van Sant with a slow, loose pace and confident charm.
Though a little heavy handed at times (Dustin, out to save the town, is given the last name “Noble”), Damon and Krasinski have crafted a very well thought out tale, one that comes across as “Local Hero” meets “Erin Brockovich.”
Otherwise, the politics are blunt and the story is familiar, especially if you’ve seen Bill Forsyth’s 1983 Scottish film, Local Hero, wherein a couple of sharp city-slickers come to a small town waving bags of cash around in exchange for resource rights, until they meet a pocket of resistance.
Contrast Promised Land to another film that plays the same game, P.J. Hogan’s My Best Friend’s Wedding.
Hal Holbrook plays a cranky, old science teacher – the town’s anti-fracking voice – while Lucas Black (“The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift”) and Scoot McNairy (“Argo”) support as working stiffs with very different opinions of Butler’s proposal.
This is not to say that there’s no place for politics in narrative storytelling — there are an abundance of examples to the contrary, from The Great Dictator to All the King’s Men to Good Night and Good Luck, in which Damon’s friend (and even more outspoken liberal) George Clooney used historical fact as a Crucible-style framework for modern commentary.