Movie Reviews: Promised Land
Steve and his sales partner Sue (Frances McDormand) are initially pleased to discover how easy it is to persuade the locals to buy into their plan, but then a local schoolteacher, Frank (Hal Holbrook), points out that the gas company’s policy of fracking will poison the land and its water supply. Matters are further complicated by the arrival of environmental activist Dustin (John Krasinski), but the biggest problem Steve faces is his own conscience as he begins to fall for Alice (Rosemarie DeWitt) and the town itself. Co-written by Damon and Krasinski from a story by Dave Eggers, Promised Land is as close to a Socratic dialogue as mainstream movies get. Another kind of film might have portrayed the gas company as moustache-twirling villains, but Damon’s gee-shucks routine ensures that the line between what might be considered good and evil is cleverly blurred. There are strong performances throughout. McDormand is excellent as Steve’s no-nonsense sales partner, a chameleon-like figure who refuses to allow emotion interfere with her hard-nosed business acumen. Krasinski offers a charmingly devilish presence as the environmental protestor, and DeWitt steals the show every time she appears on screen, lighting up some rather dull stretches with a mischievous twinkle and superb comic timing. The story does tend to plod along, with van Sant’s direction rarely more than functional. It’s all very worthy, but suffers from an excess of gas and too few sparks.
Love Is All You Need (15A) stars Pierce Brosnan as Philip, a widower businessman who regards the forthcoming marriage of his son, Patrick (Sebastian Jessen), as something of an inconvenience, particularly as it requires him to travel to Italy for the ceremony. His humour is hardly improved when Ida (Trine Dyrholm) reverses into his car at the airport, by which point the audience already knows that Ida is the mother of the bride-to-be, Astrid (Molly Blixt Egelind), and that Ida, recovering from breast cancer, has just discovered her husband in flagrante. Thus the scene is set for a potentially tear-jerking romance set against the fabulous backdrop of Sorrento, but the director, Susanne Bier, who co-wrote the script, rather over-complicates matters, investing as much time in the tribulations of the wedding couple as she does in Philip and Ida’s tentative courtship, while also shoehorning in a crudely comic element when Ida’s boorish husband Leif arrives for the wedding with a blonde bimbo in tow. All of that means that the leading pair are deprived of the time it might have taken to allow them to convincingly explore their hesitations in committing again to a loving relationship; as a result, Brosnan seems bad-tempered and distant, while Dyrholm comes across as anxious and ditzy. It’s all very beautiful to look at, but it’s never a good sign when you find yourself wishing the actors would stop blocking the scenery.
Written and directed by Mark O’Connor, King of the Travellers (15A) stars John Connors as John Paul Moorehouse, a champion bare-knuckle boxer who finds himself dragged into a feud with a neighbouring Traveller family, the Powers. The story is set in contemporary Ireland, but O’Connor gives the story a flavour of the classic western, as both Moorehouse and Powers families find themselves in conflict with ‘settlers’, aka a hardboiled Dublin crime boss who has recently moved onto land that traditionally afforded the Travellers right-of-way. It’s an intriguing set-up given a pleasing verisimilitude by the use of non-professional actors in the wider cast, but O’Connor tries to pack too much story into too short a time, with the result that the second half of the film becomes increasingly implausible. Peter Coonan turns in a striking performance as Mickey the Bags, and Michael Collins gives his role as an aging patriarch a poignant reading, but the overall standard of acting and direction lacks the rigour required to do justice to O’Connor’s ambition.
