“What I want to say is all about money,” says Steve Butler the main protagonist, in the movie Promised Land. What he hopes to claim is that, for the most part, the movie is not far divorced from real life. People need money to survive and prosper their family. In chasing that money, many of them easily give away their conscience and humanity. To a world that seems to be constructed from freezing concrete, the film desires to cry out for the hidden warmth within the human heart and let them recognize the importance of it.
The film Promised Land starts with a handsome man washing his face with a concerned look on his face. He sits down among a group of well-dressed people drinking wine and contracts his company’s head-quarters. The conversation among the people centers on money and numbers. The next scene that appears is quite distinct from the first. An old man opens the door of an old barn and drinks a cup of coffee his wife has given before getting to work. The land he is going to step is green and the sky he is getting to work below is blue.
The main protagonist Steve Butler is a competent executive for a company called Global Cross-power Solutions, which aims to extract natural gases from underground after convincing landowners to sign mineral rights leases. To accomplish the huge project of the company, Butler and his partner, Sue Thomason, visit a small town in Pennsylvania to acquire rights from the landowners there. He suggests the company will pay a tremendous amount of money to grab the locals’ attention, but it is a tough sell due to the objections of an old man and the environmental activist Dustin Noble. By getting to know the true love of these people for their land and discovering Noble is a company plant, Butler begins to fluster himself between faith and profit.
This film is unique in that the major actor, Matt Damon, had produced, screen-played, and starred the movie at the same time. He originally planned to direct the film also, but later handed the rein to Gus Van Sant due to scheduling problems. John Krasinski, who played Dustin Noble, also helped produce and write the script. They implemented the basic storyline from Dave Eggers and lengthened that into a movie which screens over 106 minutes. With the actors actively involved in completing the film itself, Promised Land possibly became more sophisticated and exquisite in their emotional portrayal.
The cinematography by Linus Sandgren had definitely spread the last icing on the film. With the environment being one of the movie’s most crucial themes, it was essential to capture the beauty and grandeur of the land on camera. To picture the scenery of Avonmore, Pennsylvania, Sandgren often utilized aerial or bird’s-eye-view shots to frame the view as wide as possible. The camera takes shots of the landscape from high above to serve every picturesque detail on screen. He also used extreme long-shots frequently to portray the small humans against the size and magnificence of nature. Such techniques work to emphasize the main theme and moral of the storyline.
One interesting point to notice in the film is character’s confrontational composition. Since most proportion of the movie is about Butler’s efforts to persuade the townspeople to acquire the rights over the land, there are a number of oppositions that occur in between. Most of the struggles are between Noble and Butler, where Butler stands for money while Noble stands for the environment. To earn votes from the locals, they take every measure to grab them to their own sides. There are also minor clashes between the mayor of the town who wants more money from Butler, townspeople against natural the gas operation, and the girl Alice who he shows an interest in. They all add amusement and tension to the film that may probably go mundane with the theme rather banal.
Promised Land can be seen as much more than mere entertainment, considering its connection with reality. Since the movie deals with the topic of natural gas extraction and the hydraulic process called fracking, there have been denunciations of it by fracking industries and a pro-fracking documentary called FrackNation. The director of the documentary, Phelim McAleer, said, “Promised Land will increase unfounded concerns about fracking.” The spokesperson for the Independent Petroleum Association of America also stated, “We have to address the concerns that are laid out in these types of films,” by mentioning the movie.
These industries allegedly persist that the film is purported to be based on an incident in a small town named Dimock, Pennsylvania. Residents there say they are the victims of natural gas extraction and claim that fracking contaminated the water in the region. According to their assertions which also appear in the film, the fracking company used chemicals in drilling through the shale and those chemicals ultimately poisoned the water. Whereas the opposition insists that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the state could not find any evidence for such arguments, the issue lingers as one of the most vehement controversy.
Besides the pros and cons of the problem, the film tries to focus on the humanity that gets lost when money becomes the end-all and be-all. In the last part of the movie, Butler confesses his greed and lies in front of the public, realizing that the game he was playing had been much dirtier than what he had expected. He notices the warmth within him by remembering his days as a youth on his grandfather’s farm and understands people’s choice not to exchange their homes for money. There undoubtedly had been something much crucial and precious than tangible material which could be grabbed in their hands immediately.
Butler first visited the town hoping that the land would promise him profit and fame, but this land instead promised him hidden warmth and hope. It was the promised land anyway anyhow. Though the movie did not attain much success, it definitely was successful in delivering its core message. It was enough for the viewers to grasp their heart and find their soul within the society frozen with money and reputation.
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