BEFORE: I think I've proven by now that I'll watch just about anything, except for franchises like "Transformers" and "The Fast and the Furious", but I've also learned to never say "never". I probably passed on this film when it was on premium cable, but now it's popped up on Netflix and I'm staring down a watchlist of over 100 titles there, and that needs to be addressed. Sure, Academy screeners seem more pressing, but they're always going to be there, it's a safer bet, while Netflix films could disappear at any moment. I've already noticed one title from my proposed January chain has been removed, so I'll have to catch that one on iTunes. But today the Netflix list goes down by one, only it's a new month so there are probably new titles there and after a quick spin around I'll probably find another dozen to add. Negative progress once again.
Matt Damon carries over from "Suburbicon", and thematically it seems OK to follow Friday's film about home heating oil with one about drilling for natural gas. Again, I'll watch just about anything these days.
THE PLOT: A salesman for a natural gas company experiences life-changing events after arriving in a small town, where his corporation wants to tap into the available resources.
AFTER: This film came out in 2012 and sort of rode the wave of anti-fracking activism, once people took a minute to learn what fracking is, and what it does to the earth, and admittedly it doesn't sound ideal, but the gas companies have been doing it since 1940, and so far the earth doesn't seem the worse for wear because of THAT, I mean, nothing on the level of the hole in the ozone layer or the greenhouse gas build-up due to bovine flatulence. (Yes, look it up... my question then becomes, if cows are farting too much, and that's bad for the environment, why can't we capture that methane before it gets into the atmosphere, and use THAT energy to power stuff? Yes, I'm proposing we heat our homes with cow farts. Somebody make it happen, because it would solve two problems at the same time.)
The first problem with fracking is, of course, the name. It just SOUNDS evil, the word has very rough consonant sounds and it seems like it should mean someone having sex in public while high on crack. (think about it...). The industry couldn't come up with a gentler-sounding name, like, I don't know, "gas whispering"? Too bad "glamping" is taken by the activity of glamourous camping, because that could have worked, like short for "gas-lamping" or "gas-pumping". Maybe "gumping"? Or get an acronym or something, jeez even "hydro-stimulation" would be a more appealing name than "fracking". Go frack yourself, frack you, you mother-fracker. See what I mean?
The second problem is the drilling rights. When someone buys a piece of land, they're not usually thinking about what's under it, in fact, how far down do a propertly owner's rights extend? Do we assume that a person owns everything under his house, right down to the center of the earth? Of course not, that would be ridiculous. Next thing you know, people would be able to charge airlines for the rights to fly planes over their land, which would be equally ridiculous. In New York City, where smaller 6-story buildings are constantly being replaced by 40-story skyscrapers, it was a thing a couple decades ago for companies to start buying up "air rights", which is the space ABOVE a particular building, I guess in case somebody wants to build a building on top of another building - and you know space is at a premium in a city when this starts to happen. (EDIT: I just tried to understand this law, where NYC air rights can be transferred to another property across the street, or down the block, and once the law gets into "maximum density restrictions", my eyes sort of glaze over and I become less interested.)
Secondly, you just can't have it both ways - I suspect some of the same people complaining about fracking are also complaining about America's dependence on foreign oil, and if we want to stop sending our money to Arab sheiks, and nuclear power isn't safe, just what the heck are we supposed to do, STOP driving cars and heating our homes? Reduce consumption? Like Americans even know what that means. Look, it's not like there's a giant ball of energy in the sky that radiates ample energy every day to meet all our needs and all we have to do is build a big enough receptor to absorb it all. Oh, wait...
Things seem to be going fine in this small town, as GlobalCorp representative Steve Butler brings his Harold Hill-like brand of salesmanship to town, under- or over-estimating the value of the natural gas under the town as need be. Again, this might be "standard industry practices", but as we learned in "A Most Violent Year", that's corporate code for "Buy low, sell high, screw the little guy". In the meantime they interact with the locals by drinking and flirting, and singing foolishly on open mic night at Buddy's Bar. But a grass-roots activist shows up to rile up the locals, and throw a monkey wrench into the machine by calling the effects of fracking on the local water supply into question. He also seems to have designs on the same woman that Steve's been flirting with, which seems like a large coincidence for a love triangle, except the town's not that big, so there are probably only a few eligible women of that age in the first place.
But I have to talk about the ending, without really talking about the ending. I would have been fine if the lead character had a gradual crisis of conscience, brought on by guilt over screwing people out of the drilling rights for their land and paying them much less than that's worth, combined with slowly developing an appreciation for the quaint rhythm of country life found in THIS particular town. But it seems that some writer didn't feel that would have been enough, so they threw another element in there that's way on the far side of being unbelievable, just in case we didn't get it by the end that the energy company was ruthless enough to do ANYTHING to secure the drilling rights they wanted. And to prove this little development was unwarranted, you just have to think about the scenes with the activist character in the middle, knowing what you find out at the end - then that whole sequence doesn't work, because if that person was really (X), then he wouldn't have done actions (Y) and (Z). I stand by that.
NITPICK POINT: Though I wasn't sure if anyone ever mentioned what state the depicted small town is in, according to the Wiki this is set in Pennsylvania. Filming was done outside Pittsburgh, according to the IMDB, so this supports that. But then why do so many residents wear cowboy hats and have southern accents? Not all of rural America is the same, though it may look the same - but farmers in Pennsylvania just wouldn't talk like farmers in Georgia.
Also starring John Krasinski (last seen in "The Hollars"), Frances McDormand (last heard in "Isle of Dogs"), Rosemarie DeWitt (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Titus Welliver (last seen in "Live by Night"), Terry Kinney (last seen in "Body Snatchers"), Hal Holbrook (last seen in "The Bachelor"), Scoot McNairy (last seen in "War Machine"), Tim Guinee, Lucas Black (last seen in "Jarhead"), Sara Lindsey (last seen in "Concussion"), Ken Strunk (last seen in "Hidden Figures").
RATING: 4 out of 10 miniature horses
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