Broken Promise

Broken Promise

By Brett Warnke

What Matt Damon’s film Promised Land gets wrong is not the existent dangers of hydraulic fracturing, also known as “fracking.”  The film stubs its toe against the real if neglected drama of how to address the problem of dirty energy extraction, even leaving out the most important agent in the growing political fight:  us. 

                The film, set in rural Pennsylvania, has Matt Damon as the public face of natural gas, Steve Butler.  He’s savvy, clean-cut, always on the prowl for a new client with available land.  In his own mind he’s “wised up” to a new and profitable growth industry that will blow life into the deteriorating regions of small town America.  He loves his job; he’s providing a service.  Butler is joined in this fight by Sue Thomasan (Frances McDormand), an effective but cynical corporate soldier that joins him in rolling across the green pastures in gas station threads, searching for more signatures in a town where local officials have itching palms and local farmers are hard up. 

                The closing of a Caterpillar plant in Butler’s Iowa hometown looms like an axe over his character.  (However, the film’s writers might have included recent details about a very real blow to manufacturing labor.  This summer’s failed strike at a Joliet Caterpillar plant lasted 3-1/2 months with workers conceding to frozen wages and low pay for new employees.  But this would have necessitated the use of the dreaded word “union.”) 

“Take the money and run” has become Butler’s pessimistic credo.  But Hal Holbrook, a local skeptic and one-time academic counters Butler arguing, “But where would we all go?”  And in Holbrook’s sharp riposte exists the thematic problem of Promised Land:  Is the answer to the issue of fracking fight or flight?  Should the inhabitants of small towns join together as a community and together, publically act to stop the system in its current inefficient and dangerous form?  Or should citizens passively, ignore environmental  concerns as inconclusive and property rights as absolute?  Instead of addressing this question, Promised Land deals with the corporate man Butler’s individual moral quandary.  While this is admittedly convincing on Damon’s part—Butler’s moral evolution is effectively slow and tortuous—if this is an effort at a political film or social criticism through drama, it fails. 

If anything, the history of 20^th century America showed us that it is not simply disclosures of corporate swindle that change the course of history.  Nor is it merely the bleating mea culpas of those who profited and then recanted from their sinister employers—what could be called “The David Stockman syndrome.”  Real change comes from the social movements and activists and local advocates who fight for it.  Yet all of these are neglected in Promised Land. 

                While the film does have an environmentalist character, the very real push for environmental justice is unaddressed.  Look at the non-violent protests seeking to stop the Tar Sands pipeline.   Look at the actions of students and environmentalists and local communities in Appalachia, profiled so well in Deep Down: A Story of Coal Country and The Last Mountain, in efforts to preserve mountains from profit-driven destructive removal.  Yet, the only meaningful resistance to fracking in Damon’s film comes from an individual within a corporation, not from the communities and activists whose fates are moored to the future of natural gas. 

This thematic problem was one of the problems of what has to be called “The Republican movie” The Blind Side.  In that film, the problems facing a black youth—mass incarceration of his peers, appalling poverty, racism, low-performing schools—are immaterial or at least undramatic to that film’s writers.  What is more dramatic, and apparently a better solution than addressing social ills, is the charity of white rich individuals personified by Sandra Bullock and family.  Damon’s much better but flawed film is laudable for addressing fracking.  For energy-thirsty America and the hard-hit areas of the northeast any discussion of the issue is important.  But failing to address real social change agents and ignoring growing local movements for environmental justice who face down filthy and aggressive corporate power gives audiences less than we deserve.  A missed opportunity on a promising story.