Featuring: Gad Elmaleh, Sophie Marceau, Maurice Barthélémy, François Berléand, Michaël Abiteboul
Director: James Huth
Screenplay: Sonja Shillito, James Huth
Website: www.madman.com.au/catalogue/view/19011/happiness-never-comes-alone
Australian release date: Thursday 30th May

Reviewer: Karen
One-word verdict: fun

Story:
Sacha (Gad Elmaleh) is a Peter Pan whose motto is “no alarm clock, no wedding ring, no taxes”. He might add no children – he is allergic to them, he claims! He spends his evenings in a jazz club where he seduces pretty girls, drinks with his mates and plays some piano. By day, he’s a jingle writer.

The two have nothing in common – except an instant attraction for each other when they meet in a chance encounter on a rainy day, when nothing is going right for Sacha. From there, it’s all up…and down…and up…and – well, you get the idea.

Review:
A French slapstick rom-com about a commitment-phobic muso who falls for a mother of three children. Mmm.

I wasn’t holding out much hope that this would tickle me. Physical comedy is not my thing, but the early scenes of Charlotte falling flat on her face, getting drenched and hit in the face with thrown car keys in rapid succession were saved from banality by the sheer watchableness of Sophie Marceau. She is just gorgeous, and so is Gad Elmaleh, who plays Sacha, the archetypal man-child.

There’s not much new to be said about the theme: love must win out, of course, after the protagonists have sampled its delights, resisted togetherness as long as they can and then faced all the obstacles the scriptwriters can throw up (literally, in the case of the recurring vomit shenanigans from Charlotte’s youngest).

It’s all done well and amusingly, it must be said, and Happiness Never Comes Alone, while ridiculously trite, is good for a few laughs.

My favourite part was a scene in which Sacha tries to pick up a sleeping child to transfer him to his own – the child’s, that is – bed. There should be a disclaimer in the credits: ‘No toddlers were harmed in the making of this film’. It seemed deliciously politically incorrect to see a little one manhandled as he is, albeit his baleful glare made him look, as Sacha observes, like a “midget Phillip Seymour Hoffman”.

Also deliciously non-PC is Sacha’s grandmother, who advises him to check his girlfriend’s children while they are asleep to see if they’re circumcised. Bad granny!

Sacha, with his magic tricks, pillow fighting and poor handyman skills, wins Charlotte’s children over in double-quick time, even the young teen-aged daughter. Just suspend disbelief: the girl’s an urger in this situation!

There’s also some enjoyable piano music, and lovely idiomatic French to listen to in this confection.

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Featuring: Liev Schreiber, Riz Ahmed, Keifer Sutherland, Kate Hudson, Om Puri
Director: Mira Nair
Writers: William Wheeler (screenplay); Ami Boghani & Mohsin Hamid (screen story); adapted from a novel by Mohsin Hamid
Website: au.rialtodistribution.com/the-reluctant-fundamentalist
Australian release date: Thursday, 23rd May

Reviewers’ one-word summations
rolanstein: novelistic
Karen: meaty

Story:
An American academic resident at a Lahore university is kidnapped by Islamic extremists. In response to American intervention, students gather to protest in the streets outside a café in which ex-pat American journalist Bobby Lincoln (Liev Schreiber) sits interviewing young Pakistani professor Changez Khan (Riz Ahmed). As Changez reflects on an earlier period of his life as a corporate high-flyer in the US, his relationship with Manhattan artist Erica (Kate Hudson), and the post-9/11 changes and realisations that soured his American Dream and ultimately drove him back to his home country, it emerges that both he and his interviewer may have hidden and conflicting agendas and perhaps even covert roles in the hostage drama that is unfolding as they converse.

Review 1: (rolanstein)
Pakistan is routinely portrayed in the Western press as dark, troubled and threatening, a dangerous and volatile backwater of a society infested with Islamic fundamentalists and terrorists. Indian director Mira Nair does not shy away from showing that side; the film opens with an American professor being accosted by a group of shadowy figures as he walks the crowded night streets. He is bundled into a car and driven off, his female companion flung aside, her cries of alarm ignored by onlookers.

The abduction is intercut with scenes of lavish spreads of food being brought around to an animated audience watching rapturous musicians performing sufi. This thrilling, mysterious and mesmerising music set to driving rock-style drumming features throughout the movie, along with colourful street and café scenes, beautifully filmed, that leave an indelible impression of a rich and vibrant culture – another side of Pakistan that should come as no surprise, but does nevertheless (testimony, perhaps, to the unbalanced picture the western press has projected for so long now).

These early scenes prefigure a major concern of the film: to peel back perceived reality, exposing the fundamental truth within. However, there is also a converse argument being put forward: that fundamentalism – the ideological variety – is dangerously reductive and dehumanising.

As an ambitious young business analyst working for a Wall Street organisation, Changez is instructed by his mentor Jim Cross (Kiefer Sutherland) to assess the value of client companies according to ‘fundamentals’. He is then required to implement changes and strategies that will maximise growth and profit potential. This often involves cutting staff, which he does dispassionately. He does not factor in the human cost, which is not part of his analyst mindset.

Changez seems set to achieve his American Dream. He is thriving in his career, and on a personal front, his relationship with local artist Erica is going well (it’s a bit of a stretch believing that, actually: there’s no chemistry between Riz Ahmed and Kate Hudson, and the latter seems miscast). Then comes 9/11.

Despite the horror of the event, Changez is able to step back and with an analyst’s eye acknowledge the “audacity and ingeniousness” of the attack. On one hand, this functions as a plot signpost pointing ominously to the direction Changez may take in the future, when he returns, disillusioned, to his home country. But it also suggests a parallel between the jihadist extremists responsible for the Twin Towers attacks and corporate America. Both adopt a fundamentalist approach that takes no account of human cost. The scale of the respective ‘collateral damage’ contrasts wildly of course, but the fundamentalist principles informing the respective actions are comparable in their ruthless disregard for anything outside their ideological parameters. In both cases, the cause is all and the end justifies the means.

Changez continues to pursue his American Dream unperturbed by the Twin Towers attacks, until he is forced into the realisation that he is now ‘other’. Passing through Customs with his colleagues on returning from a work assignment, he is singled out for a cavity search. He is spat on and his tyres let down. Plucked off the street by cops and interrogated. Even Erica begins to perceive him differently.

But it is not this rejection so much as a crisis of personal values and identity – the truth within – that calls him home to Pakistan, prompted by the sage words of a writer who is among staff he must cut during an assignment in Istanbul. Suddenly, the collateral damage he routinely wreaks in his work is personalised; suddenly, he is reconnected with the things that matter most – his home, family and cultural heritage.

All this is covered in flashbacks triggered by his recollections during an interview in a Lahore café with American journo Bobby Lincoln. It’s an awkward way to structure Changez’ story, and perhaps better suited to a novel than a film. The artifice of the structure is too noticeable in the relatively short time-frame of the movie, and the frequent switching to the past detracts from the tension of the present, rendering this thriller less thrilling than it might have been.

Really, it’s a work of ideas first, and a thriller second. But as the former, it is hamstrung by the film genre; the ideas in the mix are complex and far better suited to the novelist’s more expansive mode. Indeed, there’s a scene towards the end in which the case for humanism over extremist ideology is summed up in squirmishly flowery “literary” dialogue that is clearly authorial, relegating the character to a mouthpiece.

All in all, though, this is an ambitious, thought-provoking and timely work worth seeing, despite the migration from novel to film being less than seamless.

Review 2: Karen
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a complex construction of evidence against dichotomy in culture that nevertheless ultimately comes down to a binary choice for the main character.

Changez (Riz Ahmed) is a well-educated Pakistani who runs with princes and, in the subcontinent’s sharply delineated caste system, feels the sting of comparative poverty. He goes to college in America where his drive to succeed aligns perfectly with the American national psyche. Changez is the narrator of the story, which we learn through the many filters of his own words, time, and whatever cultural baggage we bring.

There’s an implied further filter, that of the character Bobby (Liev Schreiber), a journalist to whom Changez is telling his story, and who eventually records it; we can imagine that this tale is the novel by Mohsin Hamid that was made into a screenplay by Hamid, Ami Boghani, William Wheeler and Rutvik Oza and then filmed by director Mira Nair. Okay, I know you understand the process by which stories are turned into scripts and films are made, but it has a particular resonance in this film where themes of cultural identity, values, self perception and representation are central.

Values are particularly important. It’s no accident that the high-flying company that Changez is recruited to turns its dollar by “valuing” other companies. Changez proves his worth time and again with brilliant analysis and ruthless recommendations to strip staff and maximise profits; his mentor grooms him for a partnership.

He’s living the American dream, but Changez is actually opaque to his American colleagues. They struggle with pronouncing his name, but he’s a clean-shaven, alcohol-sipping, non-observant Muslim. He even has an American girlfriend, Erica (Kate Hudson); she, however, cannot commit to him because she is grieving for a lost love. This storyline must be read as metaphor – because otherwise it is meaningless peripheral trivia – but I found it obtuse and unsatisfactory.

Things change for Changez with 9/11 – though not in an instant: his reaction to it, which he explains to Bobby, shows that he must have been feeling some inklings of disillusionment with the US system. Previously able to get by unnoticed in America, he is now subjected to abuse and indignities. There are further catalysts, including a visit home for a wedding. Changez grows his beard, and although advised to lose it in order to fit the image of the aspiring partner, he keeps it.

The final straw comes in Turkey, when he’s required to liquidate entirely an unprofitable publishing company that has previously produced a translation of his father’s poetry. Here in Istanbul he visits a mosque, and wanders about on rooftops, considering his life choices.

He ends up back in Lahore teaching at a university, perceived and identified by CIA agents as a radical academic, but, as he patiently explains to Bobbie, actually using education as a moderate tool for change. It’s impossible, though, to remain untouched, and he fears for the safety of his family. Thus arises the framing device of the film, where in an atmosphere of campus riot, he must persuade the man he suspects can call off the heat that he is not aligned with the radicals.

The whole thing is absorbing from start to finish, and meaty ideas about the binary nature of fundamentalism, whether it relates to economics or politics, are explicitly raised, spiced with hypothetical drama, and roasted for us to chew on. There are extra full courses about culture and identity. It’s a massive buffet. You may have to step away and come back later – in other words, this is a film that’s worth seeing twice. And I haven’t even mentioned the fabulous visuals and music that make it so enjoyable to watch.

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Featuring: Eloise Laurence, Tim Roth, Cillian Murphy, Rory Kinnear, Robert Emms, Zana Marajanovic, Bill Milner, Denis Lawson, George Sargeant
Director: Rufus Norris
Screenplay: Mark O’Rowe, adapted from a novel by Daniel Clay
Website: www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfilms/film/broken
Australian release date: Thursday, 16th May

Reviewer: rolanstein
One-word verdict: pffft

Story:
11-year-old diabetic Skunk lives in a comfortable three-house middle-class enclave with her lawyer father Archie (Tim Roth), older brother Jed (Bill Milner) and au pair Kasia (Zana Marjanovic). The neighbours are a mixed bag. There is the psychologically unstable, simple but sweet-natured Rick (Robert Emms) and his parents who look after him; the adjoining house is occupied by an intimidating trio of roughneck teenage girls and their angry, violent and uncouth father, Bob (Rory Kinnear).

These neighbours become unwitting agents of change for Skunk, in effect stripping her of her childhood and innocence, and introducing her to a new grim reality of danger, injustice and tragedy. First, she witnesses Rick being horrifically beaten by Bob, and subsequently arrested for a sexual crime he did not commit. Then her apprehension at starting high school is compounded when Bob’s girls extort, bully and beat her. Worse, she discovers her brother is involved with one of them – and her father with the au pair. But all this pales by comparison with the building crescendo of traumas and miseries that awaits…

Review:
So, we have a child lead character referred to only by her nickname, an older adolescent brother, a widowed and adored lawyer father who champions the underdog, a misunderstood outsider/pariah with a soft centre who is the victim of lies and vigilantism, a theme of innocence lost… The parallels with To Kill A Mockingbird are all-too-obvious – but superficial, unfortunately.

Mockingbird stands proud on its bedrock of compelling, well-structured narrative and vivid characterisation; Broken is fatally flawed in these fundamentals.

The opening sets the structural pattern for the rest of the movie. Skunk’s awkward conversation with shy, intellectually impaired neighbour Rick is shockingly truncated when he is brutally attacked by rampaging boor-next-door Bob. We learn via flashback that Rick has been damned by a lie told by one of Bob’s daughters, who is seeking to divert her father’s anger when he discovers evidence of her sexual misbehaviour.

Retrospective revelation of motivation behind violent action is a recurring device. Good old Bob the basher’s next victim is Skunk’s favourite teacher Mike (Cillian Murphy), who cops a brutal pasting in front of the class. Again, we learn of the reasons behind the assault in flashback. This is a structural strategy designed to put the viewer in Skunk’s position: she is confused and shocked, and so are we. An understanding of the reason for the violence comes later for us, as it does for her. Fair enough, to a point. However, this mode of narrative manipulation wears thin with repetition, as does its dramatic effect.

The messing with chronology is general – often, it seems, for no good reason – and so over-done that it draws attention to itself as a stylistic device, and distracts from the content of the film. This is but one of multiple aspects of self-conscious styling, an indie branding if you will. Pretentious and irritating, in my book. Do it differently, by all means, but think it out! Everything must be in the service of the piece. Difference for the sake of difference is artistic self-indulgence, filmmaker egotism. There’s too much of that here, and little of substance beneath the ‘clever’ packaging.

The performances are good, but the actors don’t have a lot to work with because their characters are under-developed.

Bob is a one-dimensional vicious thug bereft of appeal for the viewer. Even when tragedy strikes him (as it does all who live in this apparently cursed cul de sac), audience sympathy is a step too far. His form is just too bloody nasty, his manner too uncouth. Bob’s girls are chav stereotypes and inherently as unlikeable as their paternal role model from beginning to end. Skunk’s father Archie is a contemporary – and pale – facsimile of Mockingbird’s Atticus and isn’t given much opportunity to bust free of this mould.

Eloise Laurence does a good job as Skunk, but her character does not reach the ambitious heights the screenwriter and director apparently envisaged for her. When teacher Mike makes a final breakup call to his ex-girlfriend (now Skunk’s father’s lover), his main focus – bemusingly – is on Skunk’s extraordinary qualities. She’s a great kid, he enthuses, and “one day she’s going to amaze us all.” There is nothing at all throughout the film to support this prediction. Show, not tell, chaps.

That said, Skunk is the only character who develops in any significant way, so thank the muses for her. She’s endearing in her acceptance of Rick, and her affectionate relationship with her father is convincingly negotiated, if a little saccharine. A puppy love side-story is trite but cute coming-of-age stuff that functions to contrast her character’s innocence with the ugly world into which she is thrust by a series of awful happenings. And here I come to my main gripe about the movie.

In striving for edge and grim uncompromising realism (I suppose), the filmmakers have tipped over into soapie melodrama territory. The further the film progresses the worse it gets. At a certain point, things become ludicrously ‘tragic’. Poor old Job had nothing on these dudes. It’s fair dinkum excruciating to watch it all unravel. Yet, somehow, even lower depths are plumbed as the sorry mess lurches to its end with a cringeworthy clichéd portrayal of a near-death experience.

How ever was this thing awarded Best British Independent Film for 2012? It’s an ill-hewn melodramatic tragi-fest draped in arthouse garb, and little else.

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Featuring: James Franco, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine
Director: Harmony Korine
Screenplay: Harmony Korine
Website: www.springbreakersmovie.com/
Australian release date: Thursday, 9th May

Reviewer: rolanstein
One-word verdict: fabbo

Story:
A group of hormone-charged sorority gals, Faith (Selena Gomez), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson) and Cotty (Rachel Korine), hold up a fast food joint to finance a trip south to Florida’s sunshine and beaches, where they intend to party away their spring break. When they’re arrested and escorted to the clink on drug charges, charismatic local gangster boss Alien (James Franco) bails them out, and the real fun starts…

Review:
While Spring Breakers obviously references trashy college-kids-behaving-badly flicks, it strikes a tone all its own, like Blue Velvet for example, or Pulp Fiction. It is at once derivative and startlingly original, a dream-like mind-warper of a work that opens the doors on an altered reality, edging the familiar off-tilt in an unsettling and fascinating manner.

Is it a pisstake, or does it take itself seriously? An exploitation movie, or a post-feminist female empowerment statement? A paean to popular culture, or an enraged denouncement of it? Yo.

The film opens with an extended montage of shamelessly pervy shots of pretty young thangs partying on a sun-lit beach. The shaky camera veritably sniffs at fleshy crevices twixt suntanned thighs, leers down bikini tops barely containing gorgeous goods a-shake to trippy drum and bass grooves, zooms in with voyeuristic glee when the gals get topless. There are ripped young studs in the pulsing throng, too, but the cameras are clearly and hotly hetero male in their orientation.

The beach partying goes on a long time, punctuated intermittently by the ominous sound of a gun being cocked, mixed up jarringly loud. This is a refrain that continues right through the film; it gets irritating, but keeps things pretty damned tense.

Interspersed with the gyrating beach bods are nocturnal interior scenes of bong-pulling, coke-sniffing, and sexual play that is curious in that the girls are always firmly in charge, flaunting their near-naked bodies while buff boys hang limply (sorry) in the background, politely watching on. This aggressive female exhibitionism playing to a passive – neutered, even – male audience is the mode of the sex scenes throughout. Female empowerment? Narcissism nurtured in the agar of pervasive internet porn? Whatever, something ain’t right here!

You begin wondering if anything else but partying is going to happen. It does. Just a matter of flashbacks kicking in. It soon becomes apparent that the film is all over the place chronologically, but the manic flitting back and forward is expertly managed and mercifully easy to follow.

We realise we’re not dealing with yer typical sorority cuties when the gals, still in bikinis (which they wear throughout the movie), don balaclavas and hold up a diner to fund their trip to Florida, inflicting terror on the patrons and staff with the ruthlessness and coiled violence of hardened crims.

Post-robbery, they erupt in blokey warrior whoops as they torch their getaway car, with nary a thought for the folk they’ve traumatised. The loot is everything. They kiss, smell and caress the magic paper, wash their faces in it; the mode of worship is carnal in this church of the material.

Only Faith (ha ha), the straight one of the group, doesn’t join in. Her form of worship is slightly more conventional. She attends a happy clappy Christian group led by an excruciatingly hip 30-something preacher whose shouty sloganistic sermonising culminates in a mindless group mantra of “amens”.

The theme of spiritual vacuity is picked up again when the girls hit Florida. To a backdrop of hedonistic imagery and thought-numbing dance music, one of them phones home, declaring Florida “the most spiritual place” she has experienced. It’s hilarious – erm, isn’t it?

These are the sorts of hints that run through the movie that something dark and seriously disturbing, a yawning deficit, lurks beneath the smiley dancey partying that is on such gaudy display. And the suspicion arises that director Korine is grappling with some Bigger Shit here, despairingly – savagely – rubbing our faces in our profoundly vapid culture, where the self and self-gratification is all, and humanity has left the building.

When gangster boss Alien (James Franco) appears, the movie veritably lights up, partly because he is the only character with real personality (the girls are barely distinguishable from each other), but mostly because Franco turns in a humdinger of a performance. Hugely enjoyable.

He is done up a treat, hair in cornrows, tatts everywhere, his mouth aflash with ghastly metal dental cosmetic work. Oozing charm (somehow!), he coaxes the gals back to his super deluxe lair, which is a ludicrous monument to gangster kitsch. Brandishing a rapid-fire automatic in each hand, plucked from an extensive armoury displayed on the walls, he stands on his bed like an over-sized tot and boasts of his badness, his bucks, his TV with Scarface on continuous 24 hour loop…

If he thought the girls were his playthings, he is mistaken: fingers on the triggers of loaded pistols, they subject him to a double-barrelled fellatio assault in a porn inversion scene extraordinaire. So much for those charges of exploitation pursed-lipped critics had ready to rip! Clever, Mr Korine, clever.

When it’s over, a sexually gratified Alien tenderly declares that he has found his soulmates! Terrif, but the best is yet to come.

I won’t spoil it by going into detail. Just watch for a scene in which Alien shows his “sensitive side”, serenading his new “soulmates” with an earnest rendition of Britney Spears’ love-lorn Everytime. This alone is worth the price of admission.

But it ain’t all fun and games in Alien’s world. His childhood best mate, Big Arch (Gucci Mane), is now his gangsterland rival, and a showdown is inevitable. When it comes, things don’t quite transpire as might be expected – nothing does in this delectably perverse piece.

The last scene is shot upside down. And that is emblematic of the entire movie.

This flick is going to polarise audiences. It will be scorned as vulgar exploitative trash by some. Me? I treasure these all-to-rare instances of cinema, music, literature, art, that resist meaningful critical interpretation, that demand to be taken on their own terms. And that jettison as irrelevant those who won’t accept those terms. Glorious! Transports me back to the thrilling dawn of punk rock. Suffer an old fart his sentimentality…

And don’t believe a word I say. You owe it to yourself to see Spring Breakers and make up your own mind.

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Featuring: Matt Damon, Hal Holbrook, Frances McDormand, John Krasinski, Rosemarie DeWitt
Director: Gus Van Sant
Screenplay: John Krasinski, Matt Damon (screenplay); Dave Eggers (story)
Website: focusfeatures.com/promised_land
Australian release date: Thursday, 25th April

Reviewer: rolanstein
One-word verdict: earnest

Story:
Sales partners Steve (Matt Damon) and Sue (Frances McDormand) work for Global, a mining company seeking to tap into natural gas reserves across the American farming heartland via the potentially environmentally damaging deep drilling process known as ‘fracking’. The duo is confident of earning some juicy commissions as they descend on the small farming community in their crosshairs, armed with promises of fat royalty cheques for farmers willing to sign over the mining rights to their land. However, pickings are not as easy as anticipated. Clued-up and respected local high school science teacher (Hal Holbrook) publicly takes on Steve at his well-attended town hall sales presentation. Subsequent damage control strategies are undermined when environmental activist Dustin (John Krasinski) rolls into town and mounts a well-orchestrated and potent anti-fracking campaign. But there is more to this fight than meets the eye…and a twist that dumps Steve in a moral dilemma that shakes him to his core.

Review: (rolanstein)
There is clearly an underlying agenda to this film: to draw public attention to fracking and its pros and – mostly – cons (take that word how you will).

The inherent problem with harnessing any dramatic work to an external cause is that plot and character are too often manipulated in the service of that cause, and dramatic function compromised. The trick is to keep the puppet master’s strings well hidden, which calls for ingenious sleight of hand and dramatic expertise.

Plaudits on both counts to director Gus Van Sant, and the writers and cast – to a point.

Much effort and skill has gone into fleshing out and humanising the characters, lest they be relegated to mere mouthpieces articulating opposing sides of the fracking argument.

Steve the Bad Guy, for example, is not a bad guy! He’s not a slick city sales sleaze who sees the farmers simply as sales prospects to be milked of commission; he was raised on a farm that had to be sold when times turned bad, and understands the financial struggle of those who work the land. He truly believes that the day of the small farm is over, that he and Global are offering a way out for struggling farmers doomed to unrelenting hardship. Yes, he’s open to ruthless tactics to get the best deal for his company and himself, but he believes in his product – he’s a salesman, not a fraudster.

And Matt Damon does decent and affable so well, you can’t help but like Steve as a character, however despicable his corporation might be. His shyness when he meets flirty Alice in the pub on his first night in town is endearing, as is his bumbling eagerness to please when she pushes him into a drinking competition, and his unprofessionalism when he comes to next morning with a mother of a hangover and realises he’s late for a crucial sales presentation.

His sales partner, Sue, is a single mother whose primary concern is providing for her children. If there are sometimes ethically dodgy elements to her job, well, that’s just walkin’ the walk to a decent income. As she sits in her motel room at night Skyping her teenage son, we can easily understand and forgive any job-related moral shortcomings. She is working in a greater personal cause many will relate to.

The position of the farmers, too, is complex; they are torn by conflicting forces. Some are tempted to sell out their farms for quick cash, but most are proud of their history on the land, and see their farms as part of their ancestry, intrinsic to who they are. Few are prepared to blithely sign away these precious intangibles for financial gain, especially when they realise that their land may be rendered unusable by the toxic fracking process. But then there is their children’s education to consider, and debt, and the threat of foreclosure…

The closest Van Sant comes to laying bare the film’s agenda is also one of the dramatic pivot points: the town hall meeting at which Hal Holbrook’s high school teacher character eloquently takes on Steve point-for-point, turning his sales presentation into a public debate on fracking. This scene encapsulates the difficulties of agenda-driven filmmaking. It’s necessary narratively, yet detracts from the film as an immersive audience engagement by placing poor old Hal on a soapbox. His acting is fine; it’s the didacticism infiltrating the scene that is the problem.

There is a doozy of a plot twist towards the end that puts Steve to the fire as a character and transforms the film from topical issue piece to morality play. This is where the sleight of hand referred to earlier comes in; it’s effected quite masterfully (which is why the twist works so well), apparent only in retrospectively scrutinising the plot and character setups. This is sounding all very vague and theoretical, but spoiler consciousness precludes elaboration.

Ironically, this standout dramatic manoeuvre undermines the anti-fracking message of the movie! Again, I can’t say how without being a dirty low-down spoiler.

All in all, Promised Land is an enjoyable but ultimately lightweight flick that manages to transcend its earnest agenda-driven nature to work quite well dramatically – it’s even a bit affecting at its climax (shame about the cheesy closing scene, though).

As well-intentioned as the filmmakers doubtless were, however, alerting the public to the risks of fracking is best left to documentaries like Gasland that deal in fact, rather than fiction.

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