Promised Land
Imagine that, a 9 billion dollar company pulling extremely dirty tricks to get the mineral rights off some poor farmer dudes. They send some useful idiot dude, just promoted to VP to make him feel self-important too.
Said guy is just a sales dude, going door to door to buy off the land plus mineral rights to drill for methane, using fracking. The board of supervisors outright requires a bribe, but as our guy does, he lowballs the dude. He wasn’t counting on a random MIT graduate in the audience, who just googled “Flint, Michigan” as a reminder.
Turns out our “hero” is an outright class traitor, someone raised in a farm who bilks people off their money using the carrot of million dollars in tax revenue, and the stick of lawsuits. The local people band together and force the thing into a vote.
Lo and behold, an environmentalist dude shows up, alone, with a sob story about his family farm being poisoned by fracking. He takes a bribe and prints out a lot of flyers, which enrages our heroes even more.
Of course, our hero is not alone. There’s also a sales woman, just a jobsworth, who wants to get back to her kid ASAP. They keep getting more and more leases signed, but the word starts to spread and many people just turn them away. The ones that do are white trash who live in trailers, which get the money and blow it on some sports car.
In the eve of the big vote, HQ sends a care package unmasking the environmentalist dude, he was just making up that story, they have all the ingredients to take him down. He does talk too much, and in a scene lifted from a mystery novel, our hero unmasks the masquerade: turns out the company hired the guy to pretend to be an environmentalist, just to make sure everything goes smoothly.
Goaded by the local single teacher lady, our hero gets fired by revealing that particular affiliation. The result of the vote is left in the air, but the teacher receives him in her house, so it seems she put out…
This is the lowest cosmopolitrometer rating I ever seen. It’s the anti-Straw Dogs. And not tryhard like The Town and other Affleck stuff, this is much more wholesome. It’s closer to something like North Country, but less political. This is no American Ken Loach.
Based on the Frances McDormand’s character, this is a prequel to Nomadland. The fracking business dried up, the ex got full custody, so she had to live in a van for a while.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.