joycean prodigal: Matt Damon's new movie is about people, not fracking

Bob Holmes, consultant

(Images: Scott Green/Focus Features)

In Promised Land, the new movie starring (and co-written by) Matt Damon and directed by Gus Van Sant, Steve Butler (Damon) is trying to save rural America by exploiting it. Steve works as a "landman" for a giant energy company, Global Crosspower: his job is to talk landowners into letting the company lease their property to extract oil and gas.

Steve's a good salesman - the company's best - because he believes he's on the side of the angels. When he signs up a landowner he's not just making money for his company and building his own career. He's also giving the locals money they badly need, as he knows from personal experience, having watched his own home town in rural Iowa dry up and die after a manufacturing plant closed. Steve is selling hope.

A new assignment takes Steve and his partner, the cynical Sue (Frances McDormand) to a small town in western Pennsylvania where the company hopes to begin extracting natural gas by hydraulic fracturing. This technique, better known as fracking, involves pumping a pressurised mixture of sand, water and chemicals down a deep borehole to break up a layer of shale and release the methane it contains.

At first, the locals eagerly sign up for Steve's promises of a better future through fracking. But suddenly, things start to go sideways. The local high-school science teacher (Hal Holbrook) stands up at a town meeting to say there have been reports that fracking can contaminate water supplies (photo above). Soon Dustin Noble, a hip, charismatic environmentalist (John Krasinski, who was also Damon's co-writer) arrives on the scene with photos of dead cattle and tales of ruined farms. Suddenly, many of the residents see Steve as the bad guy.

The rest of the movie develops this conflict, as Steve works to regain the community's trust and persuade them of the economic salvation he offers, while Dustin stresses the environmental risk. As Steve gets to know the local people better, his focus gradually begins to change from the land itself to the people - aided, to be sure, by a minor romantic involvement with a local teacher (Rosemarie DeWitt). A surprising revelation about Dustin near the end provides a further reason for Steve to re-examine his allegiance.

Even before its release, Promised Land had provoked a defensive response from energy companies in the US, where the environmental risks of fracking have been a hot topic lately. The Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry trade group, plans to run ads in movie theatres in Pennsylvania that direct viewers to a rebuttal website. Other defenders of fracking point out that the movie was partly funded by the United Arab Emirates, which, as a member of OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), might have an interest in discouraging rival energy sources.

Despite all this brouhaha, though, very little of the movie is about fracking itself. The process gets only the briefest description, and the real evidence of its environmental pros and cons - a subject New Scientist has covered in some detail - never gets a proper airing. Instead, the movie barely skims the surface, with cartoonishly simple references to dead cows or the easy reassurances of Steve and his company. In fact, Krasinski has said the script was originally about wind power, not fracking. The writers changed the nature of Steve's company to build on news coverage of fracking - clear proof, if any were needed, that the details didn't really matter.

That is not necessarily a fault: the movie is not a documentary. As a work of fiction, it very properly focuses instead on the human side of the question, especially Steve's deepening understanding of the complexities of the situation. Yes, he's peddling hope - the chance for poor farmers to get out of debt, to stay on their land one generation longer, to buy the computers their school so badly needs. We see all of this desperation in the eyes of some of the landowners who sign Steve's papers.

But the flip side of hope is greed, and we see that as well, in the corrupt politician who tries to shake Steve down for a bigger bribe and the too-eager young man who rushes out to buy a new sports car thinking he'll be rich overnight. And we see the ambivalence of those who fear that Steve is asking them to gamble more than they can afford to save their way of life. This willingness to sit in the uncomfortable middle ground is one of the movie's greatest strengths, as are several of its surprising, quirky characters.

But the film is really about Steve's personal journey. And here it falls a little short. Early in the movie, Steve is too much the corporate raider, happy to drop bribes and tell lies whenever they serve his purpose. And though he proudly wears his grandfather's battered old work boots - symbolic of the farm boy he started out as - he's out of touch enough that he has to buy flannel shirts and work gloves to "look like a local". Damon does a good job of portraying the gradual erosion of Steve's belief in the rightness of what he's doing. But the climactic plot twist, and Steve's response to it, end up feeling a bit contrived.

That said, Promised Land provides a rich glimpse at the human side of an important environmental issue. That alone makes it worth a look.