Stacked deck in ‘Promised Land’

By ROGER MOORE
McCLATCHY NEWS SERVICE

“Promised Land” is an engaging and entertaining — if preachy — look at Big Energy and fracking, the land-and-water-wrecking practice of drilling and pumping water and chemicals into the ground to extract natural gas from shale.

To Steve Butler (Matt Damon), a “consultant” who came from farm country himself, farming and the small farm town lifestyle are “delusional self-mythology” believed by simple people living in the past.

His “money for nothing” offer — underground leases — is “the only way (embattled, indebted small farm owners) have to get back.”
He’s just gotten the big promotion with Global Cross Power Solutions. But dropping into an Anytown, USA named McKinley with his partner, Sue (Frances McDormand) is a sobering come down. Renting an ancient Bronco II and buying flannel at Rob’s Guns, Groceries, Guitars & Gas won’t be enough this time. It may be a one-bar/one gas station town, but the locals are going to make him work for this.

Hal Holbrook is the high school science teacher who has Googled “fracking.” And as willfully uninformed as some of his shortsighted, let’s-cash-in neighbors might be, the teacher gets things called to a vote. Bribes to the local board of supervisors won’t be enough.

To make matters worse, a slick “hippy environmentalist” (John Krasinski) shows up with posters of dead cows and poisoned farms. You almost start to feel sorry for the fracking folks as public opinion shifts.

Damon and Krasinski co-wrote the script, and they set up a war of wills — rivals trash-talking each other, both flirting with the cute age-appropriate schoolmarm (Rosemarie DeWitt).

Who will win? But we already know that, don’t we? The movie is a stacked deck of cards.

Back when they filmed “Other People’s Money,” the idea was to surprise the audience by making both the populist side and the Big Business side of an argument compelling, rational and reasonable. Not here.