Promised Land

Promised Land is one of those well-intentioned but woefully inept “issue movies” that don’t add anything to the political debate they are ostensibly about.  It is a soft, by-the-numbers melodrama that tries to be fair and balanced and ends up not being much of anything. From its slow beginning to its embarrassingly false climax, the screenplay, by producer/stars Matt Damon and John Krasinski, is far too unrealistic to engage anyone who hasn’t already made up their mind about issue at the center of the story. That issue is the effects of Hydrolic fracturing (or fracking) on rural communities.

Director Gus Van Sant manages to find a lot of beautiful things to photograph, and the intention of this poetic visual style is surely to instill in the audience an appreciation for the bucolic lifestyle that the movie depicts as dying out. However, these pretty pictures only succeed in making the film feel all the more saccharine. If this movie dared to be more comical and less earnest, more along the lines of Bill Forsyth’s brilliant 1983 Local Hero which is also about an energy company encroaching on a small community, it might have been able to stir some feeling in its audience instead of putting us to sleep.