Butler's Cinema Scene

Matt Damon is this generation’s Jimmy Stewart. The guy rarely looks like he’s acting and yet we believe everything that comes out of his mouth, every gesture his characters make.

Certainly it’s hard to imagine any other contemporary actor pulling off what Damon accomplishes in “Promised Land,” a film that could easily have become a shrill pro-environmental screed but which, in Damon’s capable hands, becomes something far more challenging and subtle — a character study of an individual who may have convinced himself that wrong is right.

In the latest from director Gus Van Sant, Damon plays Steve Butler, a hotshot aquisitions man for a natural gas company. Steve’s job involves traveling around the country to purchase drilling rights from farmers and other property owners. He can take a failing ranch or a economically-strapped town and turn it into a cash cow.

As he unassumingly notes, he makes people millionaires. Clearly, Steve loves his job. He gets to hand out big chunks of money, turn around lives, leaves the world a better place.

Frances McDormand

But there’s a serpent in his little Eden. All that natural gas is had through fracking, a controversial process that involves forcing millions of gallons of pressurized water and chemicals deep into the earth. Some folks blame fracking for their cattle dying and tap water that catches on fire.

“Promised Land” finds Steve and his partner, Sue Thompson (Frances McDormand), descending on a dying rural community, moving into a motel and getting to work.

While the more mature Sue is the straight businesswoman in this partnership, Steve is the unaggressive nice guy who wears jeans and casual shirts and claims a stool at the local bar from which he buys drinks for the regulars and makes small talk. He’s such an outgoing, friendly, non-threatening people person that you can’t help but love him.

Heck, even the dubious Alice (Rosemarie DeWitt), who has returned to her family farm after years in the big city, is intrigued. There’s a hint of romance in the air.

Steve, you see, is a true believer in the Gospel of Natural Gas. When confronted about the downside of fracking by an ancient high school science teacher (Hal Holbrook), he doesn’t get defensive or angry or go on the attack. Steve doesn’t even deny the charges…he simply says that in his experience such negative outcomes are so rare as to be insignificant. And since he believes what he says, we believe him.

John Krasinski

The screenplay by Damon and fellow actor John Kraskinski finds Steve in an unfamiliar position.  The anti-fracking crowd may actually have enough clout to defeat the gas company in a municipal referendum. Even more alarming,  a hippie-ish representative (Krasinksi) of an obscure environmental group rolls into town with a backlog of fracking horror stories.

Steve is an old hand at working the crowd, but this cocky guy, Dustin Noble, may be even better. For the first time in his career, our boy fears that he may not be able to close the deal. And as if that weren’t bad enough, Dustin makes a play for Alice.

The wonder of “Promised Land” is that we find ourselves rooting for Steve to vanquish the tree-hugging Dustin despite the fact that he represents big oil. (In that regard the film is a gentle nod to Bill Forsyth’s wonderful “Local Hero,” in which a Houston oilman tries to buy a picturesque Scottish village so that it can be razed to make way for a North Sea petroleum refinery.)

And that’s where Damon’s likeability factor becomes invaluable. Without it “Promised Land” could easily slide into greens-vs.-greenbacks posturing; with it the film becomes an examination of conscience, self-deception, and betrayal.

It even has a last-act reveal that forces us to view our protagonist in an entirely different light.

Originally Damon was going to direct the film; busy with other projects, he turned the reins over to Van Sant, who helped make him a star with “Good Will Hunting” back in ’97. Van Sant obviously realized that this was a fine screenplay that didn’t require a directorial overkill; he seems to have concentrated most on getting terrific peformances and balancing the story’s conflicting issues of all-American enterprise and ecological upset. He’s done a solid  job.

| Robert W. Butler