BERLIN FILM FESTIVAL For anyone complaining that Hollywood never makes grown-up movies anymore—films devoid of superheroes and wizards and vampires, films that grapple with serious subjects in the manner of, say, the New American Cinema of the 1970s—Gus Van Sant’s drama would seem to come as a tonic: a politically engaged, timely, morally complex drama about environmental and economic issues. Unfortunately, it’s rather less so than it first appears.
Recently promoted within his company, Steve Butler (Matt Damon, who wrote the screenplay with co-star John Krasinski) arrives in a small Pennsylvania town with his colleague Sue (Frances McDormand), eager to persuade local farmers to sign away drilling rights for the natural gas deposits beneath their land; there is, he insists, 'fuck-you money’ to be made there—an unexpected jackpot for landowners deep in debt to the banks, and increasingly dependent upon federal subsidies.
But a local science teacher (veteran Hal Holbrook) raises questions at the town hall meeting convened to discuss the issue. A Ph.D., he’s been doing some research, and understands all too well the dangers associated with fracking: the poisoned soil, the dead livestock, the burning lakes. And far from being an isolated crank, the visitors realise he’s already convinced a number of his neighbours to take his side. Suddenly it seems this visit might not go as smoothly as they anticipated...
Enter Dustin (Krasinski), an activist from the Athena environmental group, who comes bearing photographic evidence of the evils of fracking (some dead cows in a field), and soon begins turning public opinion against the buy-out. And for some reason, never explained satisfactorily, his arrival seems to utterly unman the hitherto-smooth Steve, who begins behaving erratically and petulantly, as if he’s never before encountered so much as a shred of opposition. Even more implausibly, Sue—who seems to have been doing this job for longer than Steve—has no guidance or good advice to offer.
'I’m not a bad guy," Steve keeps repeating—and it’s very much to this film’s detriment that the filmmakers take him at his word. Steve is in fact so good, such a decent, principled chap, that his innocence shades into idiocy. Were there more of a sense that his pitch was intended to reassure himself as much as the locals he’s trying to persuade—that he is in fact, a decent guy who knows he’s pushing a deadly product, for the sake of doing some small, temporary good along the way—then the drama would be sharper; from such thorny, ends-justify-the-means ethical dilemmas are grown-up movies (and novels) made. And Damon is such an innately likeable screen presence, that seeing him passionately advocate a practice most viewers will find abhorrent is itself a potentially strong dramatic choice.
But no: Steve actually seems to believe his own bullshit... to the extent that he is genuinely horrified when the cynicism of his own company is finally made apparent. Whereupon, he is left with no option but to Do The Right Thing, via a heartfelt speech. (It’s not enough, apparently, that Steve be a stooge or, worse, a hypocrite: he must also be absolved, and thereby redeemed.)
Thus the film, intended as a polemic, succumbs to the worst—which is to say, the phoniest—kind of Hollywood sentimentality; in the end, this is less Gasland than Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Never mind that this is no longer 1939. Or that corporate misfeasance the film describes, is increasingly perceived as standard practice. Or that the choices here are tougher ones than this script will concede.
In fact, though it might pain us to admit it, a good deal of Steve’s sales-pitch is correct: these towns are dying, and so is the way of life they represent. And fracking, despite the extensively documented environmental hazards (news of which seems, for some reason, to have quite passed him by), offers a short-term fix that a lot of American communities have been understandably eager to take. Any way you slice it, that’s a dramatically potent situation. Steve’s speech to some rednecks in a bar, about their drastically limited options, is a rare moment of clarity and common-sense; and his own backstory—about the Iowa farm where he was raised, and which his family lost—lends him a real stake in this soon-to-be-extinct world. The same world he’s helping to despoil, albeit for what he considers the best of reasons.
Supporting Damon, Frances McDormand struggles to make the best of a severely underwritten role as his partner, so absorbed by her family life as to be untroubled by even a flicker of professional conscience. ('It’s just a job," she sighs.) Rosemarie DeWitt, meanwhile, as an unaccountably single woman, also does a lot with a little—and even better still is co-scripter Krasinski, whose Dustin, lanky and overly-avuncular, captures something of the sanctimonious condescension of the modern eco-warrior.
One of the most unpredictable of contemporary American filmmakers (My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, that Psycho remake, the Bela Tarr homage that was Gerry—how many other filmographies boast such range?), Van Sant is this time working squarely in his mainstream register, the slick professionalism of Finding Forrester and Milk; he’s aided by some quietly ravishing cinematography from Linus Sandgren (replacing his usual collaborator, Harris Savides, who died late last year) and editing by Billy Rich. All in all, it’s a well-crafted, efficient package, handicapped only by a lack of the very rigour and conviction this story, and this setting, demand.
The film, intended as a polemic, succumbs to the worst—which is to say, the phoniest—kind of Hollywood sentimentality.
