Director: Gus Van Sant
Year Released: 2012
Rating: 2.0
Two salespeople (Matt Damon and Frances McDormand) get sent by their company to a tiny Pennsylvania town with a tremendous amount of natural gas underground and need to convince the residents to lease their land - on the opposing side is a super-educated science teacher (Hal Holbrook) and a meddling environmentalist (John Krasinski) who warn the residents about the dangers of hydraulic fracturing (also known as 'fracking') and its potentially cataclysmic effects on the air and water supply. Basically, this is new-wave propaganda thinly (and I mean thinly) disguised as a down-home drama positing a wealthy corporation against folksy, poor farm people - there's something of a (poorly plotted) twist in the third act to make Damon "see the light" and plenty of speeches about The Nobility of Honest Farmers to get the Organic/Locally Grown Crowd cheering (to be fair, discussing the problems with fracking are important, but that seems better left to research articles and not, in this case, Hollywood). Surely I'm not the only person concerned that this was produced by agenda-pushing Participant Media and Imagenation Abu Dhabi, am I (Abu Dhabi being a city built up with oil money, right)?
