Once in a while a film will tackle the subject of corporate poisoning of public land, and the people who live on it.  The best of them, like Erin Brockovich (2000) and Dark Waters (2019), are palpably sincere efforts to tell heart-wrenching stories of those wronged in the name of profit, and represent a moral pinnacle of compassionate filmmaking.  But that isn’t the only way to tell a story, as this movie proves.

Edward James Olmos’ film tells a similar story: The tree farm of Fred Stern (David Strathairn) is land that an oil company wants, but he refuses to sell.  Soon his land is poisoned by contaminated groundwater, his trees are deliberately burned, his foreman (Olmos) is set up to be deported and his life is threatened.  These machinations are pretty standard for this kind of (true) story, but director Olmos and his writer, Robert McEveety, spend more time and effort telling the story from the oil company’s perspective.  When oil company executive Gigi (Kate Bosworth) fails to buy Stern’s farm, she is undermined by a colleague, Ezekiel (Pablo Schreiber), who uses much more forceful means to get the oil company what it wants.

What is so awkward, and rather off-putting, is that Olmos stages much of the film as dark comedy, especially all the oil company shenanigans.  Watching the oil people gleefully take meetings about drowning Stern in red tape, or watching Ezekiel push Gigi into alcoholism, or watching Big Boss (Alfred Molina) and his executive henchmen slyly preparing to fire and publicly humiliate Gigi at her debriefing, just feels wrong.  Olmos is a well-known activist, and perhaps he is trying to show the folly of the oil company by scorning the arrogance and audacity of its employees. But when even Stern’s efforts to stay afloat by hiring a fancy lawyer (Martin Sheen) are lampooned by courtroom scenes making the lawyer out to be a buffoon, I think the filmmakers are just trying too hard.  Let the story tell the story.

Naturally a twist occurs near the end which puts things in a somewhat moralistic light, but even this feels rather overstated.  Frankly, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.  The story feels manipulative, with the wrong tone set in many scenes.  Strathairn and Olmos are fun to watch together, but even this is tested when they fight each other for no good reason.  It’s fine to try different approaches to telling stories, but this is the type of drama where a straightforward sincere touch is definitely the way to go.  ☆ ☆.  10 May 2021.