There was so much to hope for from Promised Land: the Matt Damon and Gus VantSant partnership, which worked so well in Good Will Hunting; Matt Damon; Frances McDormand  (Blood Simple, Fargo and Burn After Reading); and the neat combination of a green theme with a heartland of rural America setting. After watching the awesome trailer I was super-excited to go. But I was sorely disappointed. John Krasinski makes for a wonderful villain and there are some fantastically crisp lines from Damon and McDormand but I still felt that Promised Land was just really bad.

We follow Steve Butler (Damon) , a boy-done-good from rural Illinois as he travels around a small farming town in Pennsylvania convincing locals to sell the fracking rights (a  controversial kind of gas drilling) to massive energy conglomerate Global Cross Power Solutions. Things seem to be going fine but at a town meeting a milky eyed and prophetic Hal Holbrook rallies the town against the pitch, calling for a vote. An infuriatingly saccharine eco-warrior, Dunstin, (John Krasinksi) rocks up, forcing Steve and his sardonic associate Sue to extend their stay to fight for hearts and minds. Cue the descent into a kind of coming of age film.  As the battle for the town plays out in the background Steve pursues a mild interest in a vacuous local (Rosemarie de Witt) and ends up reconnecting with his roots.

The film wanted to go in so many directions that it ended up going in none of them. A friend of mine suggested it was a “still watchable Hollywood does the environment” movie but , with all the ham-fisted attempts at subtlety, it looked more like Hollywood studio trying desperately to make an art house film. We were given a lot of drawn out montages, to innocuous country and western tunes, and self-conscious close-ups from odd angles of Matt Damonor some dialogue where the camera pans out to focus on the background of the stars and stripes, or a child playing in the distance

The real politics was forgotten as the film runs away with the personal battles between Steve and Dunstan.  However, The characters aren’t fleshed out properly so you can’t care about the on-going, “tense” storylines. McDormand is very watchable but has very little dialogue. The town, too, makes for a dull setting. It’s preposterously bucolic: there are dolls-house white cottages, neatly mown verges, and big, full, fields everywhere. The film also overuses one-dimensional “ clever yokel” minor characters to challenge Steve’s perceptions, but rather than being wise and likeable, they just pop up being curiously and rapaciously intellectual. This makes the film’s anti-corporate U-turn feel condescending and naïve: isn’t Steve buying into the same ‘mythology’ he scorned at the start?And this is hugely disappointing since you are drawn to him from the off by the fact that he’s convincing and hope that he’ll be in the right. By the end it wasn’t so much that I didn’t know what to think but was firmly engaged; it’s just that I wasn’t thinking at all as the script vomited out little chunks of predictable ad-speak and nostalgic refrains about “ Grampa’s Ol’ Barn” all over my shoes.