I thought there were three big points the film brings up that just about everyone can think over without the points becoming controversial.
1. Many people are unconcerned with the "hot button" issues of the day. They are humans and they mainly care that they can put food on the table and send their kids to college to give them a better life. This is exemplified with Matt Damon and Frances McDormand speaking with the people of the town. Some may look at this as a "good vs. evil" issue in the big scheme of things, but most people don't live their lives that way. They make decisions that will feed their family and give their children a good quality of life. We must understand that humans are behind these giant issues.
2. When Frances McDormand says "It's just a job." Again, these are people making these decisions to do things that benefit their employers. Not because they are evil "conservative/corporate/capitalist/other denigrating labels" people. It's because that's how Frances gets to go home to her kids after a few days and how Matt gets to keep his job. It's not a huge evil scheme, people do what they do at work for pretty much universal reasons: To either move ahead or to keep their jobs. This is why door to door salespeople and fraudulent debt collectors continue to bother me even though they are aware I don't want it: The person has a job to do. There are seldom few who might quit over some sort of ethical qualm, like Matt Damon's character in this film (or myself when I didn't like that my job called for denying people breaks and then filling out their time cards later as if they had a break, which was of no bother to most supervisors because they were just doing their jobs.)
3. The biggest message is that we have built walls in the center of controversial issues to avoid communication. The discussion in the movie involved political "business vs. environmental health" talking points. Hal Holbrook's character is the only character who wants to look into fracking, but then he's just talking at the people because he has no one to talk to. The people in the town are too concerned with money being brought into their community which desperately needs it (see point 1 or look to the millions of people living in areas that desperately need the revenue in the real world.) Likewise, our Global employees are just trying to do their jobs (see point 2.) They don't care about the big issues brought up in the film.
I would argue that this film very accurately portrays how people see these issues: They don't; because they are too concerned with more pressing and human matters. This makes us jump to side with whatever argument gets us closer to our goals. At the end of the day, the choice was to bring money to the farming community expediently, the only hitch being the possibility of losing the farms to immediate environment effects. I would also argue that this film spends more time examining how people realistically deal with environmental issues than it spends pressing an environmental issue. In this way it isn't really an environmental film, but more of a character study.
To further support that argument, look at how many of these threads contain "liberal", "conservative", "propaganda", etc. Most of us tend to pick one side or the other and view everything from that lens and from that side of the proverbial wall, making it difficult to discuss an environmental issue with each other. One final comment, not about the message but about the quality or the film, it did get a bit didactic at points (films do this to make points, I understand, but it isn't particularly enjoyable when they do this) so my personal rating was 8/10.
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