Movie Review Promised Land

Promised Land (2012) 

Directed by Gus Van Sant

Written by Gus Van Sant 

Starring Matt Damon, John Krasinski, Frances McDormand, Rosemarie Dewitt, Hal Holbrook 

Release Date December 28th, 2012 

"Promised Land" has an earnest charm that sadly isn't enough to repair its airless, smug storytelling. Written by stars Matt Damon and John Krasinski, "Promised Land" is an achingly liberal tract about the environmental dangers posed by gas companies and while there is a nobility of ideas, there is a distinct lacking in execution.

Born in a Small Town

Damon stars as Steve Butler, a rising star at a gas company called Global. Steve is from Eldridge, Iowa and was deeply influenced by the loss of a Caterpillar plant in Davenport that, for a time, devastated the local economy of his hometown and surrounding towns. That loss drives Steve today to buy up struggling family farms in hopes of enriching people who remind him of his former neighbors.

That much of what Steve is selling are lies does wear on him but he hopes that the potential for big checks for himself, and the small town folks he's buying up, will make up for his bad karma. Steve's partner Sue (Francis McDormand) is driven more by her paycheck than her backstory.

Together they travel to a small farming community in Pennsylvania where they hope to sell the locals on selling their land to the gas company. Steve and Sue find trouble however, in a local teacher (Hal Holbrook) and an out of town environmentalist (John Krasinski), eager to stir up anti-natural gas sentiment.

Small Town Showdown

That's the set up for a small town showdown but where the film goes from there is far too silly and smug to support the kind of drama that the stars and director Gus Van Sant want to create. We know from the beginning, as Steve is dunking his head in a bathroom sink, that a crisis of conscience is imminent. We also know the crisis of conscience is coming because Damon is a well-known liberal activist playing a character working for an evil gas company.

Whether you're inclined to agree with Damon and Krasinski or not doesn't really matter. You can be a hardcore, left wing, liberal Democrat and still find "Promised Land" mind numbingly predictable; at least in the case of Damon's Steve. If you can predict where Krasinski's character is headed, you're better at this than I am and you will also still be dumbfounded by it.

Charming Stars

All of that said, and putting my issues with the film aside, it's impossible for this group of stars, which also includes Rosemarie Dewitt as Damon's love interest/savior, not to have a little charm. Krasinski pours on the smug as the righteous environmentalist but he does deliver a charmingly bad Bruce Springsteen karaoke performance. Damon is a little more troublesome as he has the burden of predictability around his neck.

Thankfully, Damon is well teamed with Dewitt and their scenes together crackle with the chemistry of a more interesting movie. McDermott is her usual fascinating, funny self as the more pragmatic and resigned character than Damon. And then, of course, there is Holbrook who lends the film his integrity for a couple of pretty good scenes.

Is "Promised Land" a bad movie? No, but it is far from a good movie. The film telegraphs its intentions and never raises enough interest to get around its predictability. There is a good deal of skill and charm in the acting and direction of "Promised Land" but it is in service of a failing, predictable, tract of a story.

Movie Review Gerry

Gerry (2002) 

Directed by Gus Van Sant

Written by Gus Van Sant

Starring Matt Damon, Casey Affleck 

Release Date February 14th, 2003

Published February 8th, 2004 

There has always been a hunger for films that challenge traditional cinematic form. Films that break with convention and deliver something that is diametrically opposed to Hollywood filmmaking. For the most part these challenging films came from Europe where the avant-garde arose as an artistic movement and a reaction to the encroachment of Hollywood formalism into European film markets. These challenging films are still being made but the hunger for them has died down, beaten back by the invention of the blockbuster and the big business that is Hollywood.

These films, however rare, are out there and Gerry from director Gus Van Sant is one of the most fascinating.

The film begins without credits. We simply open with light classical score and a long shot of a car on a lonely highway. This shot lasts for three or four minutes before switching to a shot of our two protagonists played by Casey Affleck and Matt Damon as they continue to drive. No words are spoken. Finally, they reach their unspecified destination, a hiking trail through the desert. Still no words are spoken.

It isn't until the 8-minute mark that a line of dialogue is spoken but it's not very enlightening except as a minor sign of things to come. A sign that says this is not a film where dialogue is going to explain, enlighten or entertain. As the two friends continue their journey, they bail on the hiking trail for a supposed shortcut before finally becoming lost in the desert. All of the film’s dialogue act as conversations that have already started before we met the two characters. There is a joking conversation about Wheel Of Fortune, some odd conversation about what I think was a video game, but not anything that is going to lead to a conventional plot.

The lost in the desert situation is no Blair Witch exciting fight for survival or wacky slice of life ala some ridiculous sitcom. It simply is what it is, two guys lost in the desert looking for a way out. The two characters never react the way you would expect from a conventional plot. There is very little whining or carrying on. Indeed neither character seems all that concerned about surviving or dying. If they are concerned they keep it to themselves, it's up to us in the audience to fill in the blanks.

In it's minimalism of one handheld camera, sparse dialogue and characters, Gerry is a direct challenge and reaction to the typical explain-it-all-style of the Jerry Bruckheimer era. No obvious explanatory dialogue that leads the audience to obvious conclusions, no quips and no filler before the next explosion of bullets. Gerry has none of those elements and goes to the very opposite extreme. For that I was willing to stick with and feel rewarded at the end. Challenged to create much of the movie in my own mind I was mesmerized by the film and it's techniques.

The films title is odd and not just in it's spelling of the oft-used name. In the film, both characters refer to one another as Gerry but one suspects that it is neither of their real names. In fact, Gerry is an in joke amongst Damon and Affleck's circle of friends. A “Gerry” is a fuck-up, someone who constantly screws up. A fitting title for two guys who manage to get lost in the desert in this day and age when everyone everywhere has a cellphone, pager, blackberry, and any myriad number of other electronic leashes to the outside world.

In that sense, what if the whole film is one big in-joke? What if Damon, Affleck and Van Sant simply went to the desert, film absolutely random shit and called it a movie? They put it together professionally with technical prowess in editing, shooting and scoring to make it look legitimate. Then released the film so that people like myself could rhapsodize about it's minimalist genius and it's influences garnered from Bela Tarr and Fassbinder and other people only snobs have ever heard of.

Whether or not we have been made a fool of, we will never know. I for one don't care if I have been duped. I enjoyed the opportunity to so actively watch the film. To take my mind in odd directions in order to fill in the empty passages that are filled with shots of the two actors walking and the sound of rock under foot. Gerry is a form of film meditation and I dug that about it. 

Movie Review Milk

Milk (2008) 

Directed by Gus Van Sant

Written by Dustin Lance Black 

Starring Sean Penn, James Franco, Josh Brolin, Victor Garber, Diego Luna

Release Date November 26th, 2008 

Published November 25th, 2008 

The life of Harvey Milk is an inspiration. The first openly gay elected official in the country was a bold, brave and brilliant man. He was a fighter and a politician and a flawed soul. A movie about his life needs to capture these aspects of Harvey Milk and the Gus Van Sant movie Milk comes up just short. It's not that Milk is poorly made or even that it fails to honor the man. It's just that such an atypical hero deserves something far more than a very typical biopic.

Sean Penn takes on the role of Harvey Milk picking up his life story in the early 1970's when a fully closeted Harvey cruised a young gay man in a New York subway. That young man was Scott Smith (James Franco) and he drew Harvey out of the closet and into the life he had always longed for. The two moved to San Francisco and opened a camera shop in the Castro District. That area of San Francisco is now a famously gay enclave but when Harvey and Scott arrived that wasn't the case. Milk slowly but surely ingratiated himself in the community, he drew people to him and eventually as the community changed with him, he became its leader.

His rise from community organizer to politician was filled with potholes and roadblocks but eventually Harvey was elected to the City Board of Supervisors where an alliance with Mayor George Moscone (Victor Garber) would make history and repeated run-ins with fellow supervisor Dan White (Brolin) would lead to tragedy. To tell the story of Harvey Milk's life Gus Van Sant has Harvey narrate his own story in flashback. As he sits at a table alone in his apartment Sean Penn as Harvey recalls the incidents of his life into a tape recorder. The device frames the film but it's one of many signs of just how typical the movie is.

The flashbacks unfold in predictable fashion recalling all of the well known moments of Harvey's life that shine a positive light on him. Leaving out a few of the less flattering moments, generally celebrating the things that Harvey Milk accomplished in the all too short time he was in public service. There is nothing terribly devastatingly wrong with Milk. It just shouldn't be so typical. This is the same biographical formula applied to every life from Ray Charles to Johnny Cash to any famous person you can think of whose life has been brought to film in the last decade.

The movie suffers from what I like to call Van Sant-itis. This is a malady that affects movies directed by but not written by Gus Van Sant. Movies like Finding Forrester, Good Will Hunting and To Die For are all enjoyable movies but each lacks the director's full engagement. Watch Elephant, Gerry, Last Days or Paranoid Park and you can see a fiercely committed director dedicated to bringing his vision to the screen. There is an almost visceral difference in the directors engagement with his filmmaking in these films, especially when compared to the often soft focused laziness of his non-writing credited films.

Milk is as close as Van Sant has come to committing to another writer's vision, he seems to really care about Dustin Lance Black's work, but as the film goes along you sense the drift in Van Sant's attention. As the movie goes on, after brief early love scenes, the film drifts into conventional biopic mode and rolls to its tragic finish on a wave of typicality. The only truly outstanding thing about Milk is Sean Penn. He embodies Harvey Milk mind, body and soul and his commitment almost overcomes the strict adherence to biographical formula. Penn's performance is as brave and bold as the man he plays but he is hemmed in by the numbers biopic recipe.

Milk is a disappointment only because I was expecting something more from it. The film suffers from building expectations. It suffers from our expectation of something better than your average Hollywood biopic.