I’ve just seen “Promised Land,” the soon-to-be-released anti-fracking movie writtenand produced by Hollywood A-Listers Matt Damon and John Krasinski. They plainly have their Oscar hopes up, and maybe the Academy will come through.
But the film won’t do well at the box office, because it’s crippled by its Hollywood eye on America.
Even if you agree with the biases of “Promised Land,” it’s just too slow and ponderous; even its humor isn’t humorous.
It pushes all the right buttons for Oscar nominations. Where most people see slow, ponderous movies, the Academy sees deep and intelligent. When the audience sees Damon taking himself too seriously, the Academy merely see him being serious.
But Damon and Krasinski have produced a flawed movie not because they don’t understand movie-making but because they don’t understand Americans.
You can see this in Steve Butler, the character Damon plays. At the film’s start, he’s intelligent and witty; Steve knows people and knows his business. He has all the answers as he goes from home to home, reassuring people looking to lease their land for fracking — a process that removes oil and gas from previously-inaccessible rock.
But then, on his last job before he takes a big promotion, he comes up against Krasinski’s character, environmentalist Dustin Noble. Noble produces wild stories of farms polluted and destroyed from natural-gas drilling and warns the locals that this will happen to them if they let the gas company into their area.
This is when “Promised Land” starts to falter. Suddenly, Steve transforms from someone who’s seen and done it all in the gas-drilling world into a stammering fool who can’t come up with a decent sentence in defense of his industry.
Damon’s character should say that environmental activists have been caught time after time lying and exaggerating about fracking — often as part of multimillion-dollar lawsuits. He should point out that no peer-reviewed scientific study has ever shown that fracking contaminates water.
But no, half way through the film, when any real drilling hand would have plenty of answers, Steve suddenly turns into a stammering, inarticulate fool. The character becomes unrecognizable.
This inexplicable change sucks the life out of “Promised Land.”
It doesn’t make sense in the movie — but it’s understandable when you realize that, in real life, Damon and Krasinski are anti-fracking ideologues. Damon spoke out publicly against the process some time ago; Krasinski has now done a long anti-fracking rant on David Letterman’s show.
They probably don’t know the arguments Steve should make; they certainly don’t want to hear them, nor could they really allow any criticism of the environmental movement in the film, since it would undermine their own ideology.
But there is a bigger reason why “Promised Land” fails in the second half. Damon and Krasinski don’t really like or trust most Americans, and it comes across. The residents are either good (and thus on the side of the environmental movement) or stupid and greedy, people who’d sell their grandmother for money.
Think I’m exaggerating? Damon revealed his true feelings in the film’s Oscar campaign. In a recent interview with Deadline Hollywood, Damon compared farmers who lease their land to gas companies to parents who “bring [their] daughters to the whorehouse when times get tough.”
Yep, that’s what Hollywood thinks of middle America. They don’t care that farmers have been leasing their land for drilling as long as the oil industry has existed in America. They don’t care that farmers love their land and have no intention or desire to see it destroyed.
No, Damon and Krasinski believe that renting your property to a regulated and insured American company is the equivalent of selling your daughter to a whorehouse.
Middle America will probably respond to these attitudes by staying away from “Promised Land”; Tinseltown may well respond with multiple Oscars.
And Hollywood wonders why box-office numbers are falling.
Phelim McAleer is the director of “FrackNation,” a documentary that will be released in 2013.