Promised Land (2012)

Gus Van Sant's Promised Land arrives with the quiet dignity of a film that knows exactly which argument it intends to lose. Matt Damon plays Steve Butler, a natural gas landman who descends upon a struggling Pennsylvania farming town with lease agreements and a practiced smile. The energy conglomerate Global Crosspower Solutions functions as the designated villain, deploying staged photographs and a hired infiltrator to bend a small democracy toward its drilling rights. The film regards this corporation with undisguised suspicion, framing extraction as predation dressed in a windbreaker. That is the engine here, and it runs on a steady, earnest hum of environmental concern.

Frances McDormand's Sue Thomason is allowed competence, and Rosemarie DeWitt's Alice is allowed a pulse, but the screenplay never pauses to interrogate gender, race, or any identity beyond the economic. The town is white, rural, and aggrieved about water and property values. Nobody in the frame complicates that. The environmental messaging is the load-bearing wall, and it holds. A town hall debate over fracking chemistry supplies the closest thing to a sermon, though the late revelation that the activist is himself a corporate plant muddies the congregation's sense of whom to boo.

The film's central irony, that a man selling poison slowly discovers he believes in the land, is handled with a straight face and a warm score. It is sincere, well-acted, and modest in its ambitions, which is more than most message pictures manage. The picture lost money and irritated the gas industry, an outcome that suggests it landed somewhere near its target. We are left with a competent drama that preaches gently, indicts capital politely, and never once asks its audience to think about anything other than the wells.