If you can set aside your belief system for a movie that tries its hardest to be believable, you will enjoy Gus Van Sant’s (Good Will Hunting, Milk) Promised Land. The film takes on a highly controversial topic and an issue that will continue to be discussed more and more in the near future. Because the subject is so contentious and so important, it seems highly unlikely that just two natural gas company executives, played by Matt Damon (The Bourne Identity, The Departed) and Frances McDormand (Fargo, North Country), would be the sole representatives trying to win over a rural town to vote for their company to move in and start drilling their farms.

Matt Damon stars as Steve Butler, the number one corporate salesman for a $9-billion-a-year company called Global. His job is to go to small, rural towns around the country to persuade the locals to sell the drilling rights on their property to extract natural gas. Since a good majority of the people in these small towns are farmers with vast amounts of land but no stream of steady income, they are basically broke. Steve Butler sort of waves a lottery ticket over each of their heads. He is very good at what he does and has a prepared speech that he delivers on a property-by-property basis. It attempts to persuade the broke people to sell their drilling rights on their property to Global to extract natural grass. The more acres an individual owns, the more a down payment they will receive. They will also receive a percentage, not to exceed 18%, of the money generated from the natural gas in their fields. Steve claims to be an honest guy and feels he is doing nothing ethically irresponsible when he presents the information to the members of the town.

While selling their land rights is guaranteed to make the land owners lots and lots of money (millions depending on how much land they owe), there are nonmonetary concerns to consider. For example, the process of extracting natural gas is called fracking. It involves shooting high-pressurized water combined with different chemicals into the ground, breaking up the rocks buried miles beneath the surface, and ultimately allowing the natural gas to the surface. Some, including local high school teacher Frank Yates (Hal Holbrook – Into The Wild, That Evening Sun), claim that the chemicals can get into the local water supply, a claim that Steve squashes.

However, the arrival of environmentalist Dustin Noble (John Krasinski – television’s The Office, Away We Go) with proof that the chemicals have killed livestock in a nearby county causes an uproar. This makes the decision very, very real for the folks of the tight-knit community. They decide to have a town vote on whether or not to allow Global to buy their drilling rights. That’s three weeks for Steve and Sue (McDormand) to persuade the townsfolk to vote, yeah, and three weeks for Noble to convince those same people to vote. Steve and Sue’s pitch is easy. Money. Suppose the members of the community don’t take Global’s offer. In that case, Global will move to the next town, and those people will continue to struggle to make ends meet in a city with no future outside this natural gas opportunity. Dustin sees this town vote as an ultra-important step. If one town can say no to the money being offered because of the fear of what it will do to the environment, then others will do that too.

The personalities of the three lead characters and the way that they interact with the locals are as much a part of the story as the idea about whether to allow drilling or not allow drilling is. How the town responds to the leads as individuals could have a lot of influence on how they vote. The local we get to know the most is Alice (Rosemarie DeWitt – Rachel Getting Married, The Company Men), an elementary school teacher who lives on a farm like so many others. Steve and Dustin each meet Alice at a town bar. Alice is a very likable character, and she seemingly represents the town.

I enjoyed this movie. Yet it was just so hard to believe that just the fate of the town, when hundreds of millions of dollars are on the line, rests in the hands of just two people (Steve and Sue) regardless of how good they are at their jobs. It’s just too much money. I could see the two of them going into the small city, pitching their plan, and then getting the locals to sign on the dotted line. But as soon as it is decided that the decision to drill or not to drill would be left up for the town to vote, you would think that a $9 billion-a-year company like Global would send all of their henchmen to ensure the vote went in the company’s favor. So to me, this was a sticking point. Yet enough good things were going on in this movie that allowed me to, to an extent, see beyond this. Ultimately though, it was too dismissed completely. The performances were outstanding. I loved the rural, bankrupt farming community that Van Sant created. I felt like I was a part of that community.

At the time of the viewing, this movie is a top 10 of the year. However, with viewings of Zero Dark Thirty, The Impossible, and The Sessions still to come, I don’t envision it staying in the top 10.

Plot 9.5/10
Character Development 9/10
Character Chemistry 9.5/10
Acting 10/10
Screenplay 8/10
Directing  8/10
Cinematography 8.5/10
Sound 8.5/10
Hook and Reel 9/10
Universal Relevance 9/10
89%

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