Promised Land

All depression without any real transition as to the why? You just kind of have to accept that's just how it is once high school is over and feel their pain without any inkling of hope. Leave the knife and sleeping pills at home when you watch this one.

I can't believe anyone referred to this as fluff;hate it, but no way is this fluff. It was almost creepy to me how this non-didactic near masterpiece captured a lot of what the 80's were about for most Americans by telling this seemingly simple tale of disaffected young people in some small burg in the Midwest. Of the four principles, two want to get out (only one can articulate to what, and she's hasn't convinced herself), one needs to stay because his only real defining moments were there, and the fourth is a near sociopathic drifter, who meets up with the clueless one who leave smallburg because he doesn't know what else to do. Even this character, Bev (Meg Ryan actually showing range instead of getting rich off Nora Ephron fluff she can walk thru), needs "home" in some way, and convinces clueless Danny to marry her (a great wedding scene; gives new meaning to the word "downscale") and take her to meet his folks. Former star HS athlete Hancock (Jason Gedrick), the one who couldn't leave, has become a cop and is trying to convince ex HS sweetheart Mary (Tracy Pollan) to come back and stay, and she IS conflicted, but ultimately knows she has to get away. It sounds somewhat pedestrian, but it's played to expose more than human frailty, but how we can destroy ourselves and others without ill will. It also, probably unconsciously, shows us a piece of the majority of USA that wasn't getting rich in the 80's, and in fact was struggling with diminished expectations and an increasing gap between the haves and have nots. Tom Wolfe gave us the smarmy pseudo-satire "Bonfires of the Vanities", Michael Hoffman got us a peek at what was and, to some extent, what was to be. The slowly spiralling paths of the characters in Promised Land eventually collide with tragic results. There is no salvation or redemption.-- The End Oh, you want to see Meg Ryan take another chance and come up winners, check out "Hurlyburly" and her small but memorable role in this actors' movie adapted from David Rabe's play.

Dave Hancock is a small town athletic star who goes away to college as a basketball player on scholarship. When he washes out of the team he drops out of college and comes home to find a job on the local Police department where he's comfortable among the folks he's always known and able to relax in his former glory.

Mary his head cheerleader girl friend goes away to school to study art but also longs for the small-town life and the boy she's left behind. She's got big dreams but is afraid to leave the comfort of the small town and afraid to tell her family she wants to stay.

Danny Rivers, tagged `the Senator' was a nobody in high school and can't wait to leave for the world outside the town he's grown up in and the bleak undemonstrative family that raised him.

When Danny meets and marries a crazy do-as-she-pleases girl he decides to return home and all of their lives are changed forever...

I found this movie to be evocative of a period and had better than average character development but this film will not appeal to all. It is a sketch of a time and a place and the people there. They are not archtypes, they are not universal but they are realistic and you can care about them and as with many sketches the viewer is left with the desire for more, a more complete picture, a better sense of what comes next and even a few more details about the present.

Two principles are anxious to get out of a small burg in the mid west and one refuses to leave the only place where he ever had any recognition (as a star high school athlete) and becomes a local cop. The wild card here is a drifter and borderline sociopath who nonetheless also needs something like "home", but has no idea what that is.

Played by Meg Ryan as you've never seen her. Although if you rent "Hurlyburly" you'll see what she can do with a well written part not seemingly made for her; this woman can act, but apparently would rather have Nora Ephron help her be a star and get fat deals playing variations on the same person. Rant aside, Ryan's character hooks up somewhere in the west with the most disaffected of the small-towners, played as a not very bright but enigmatic loser by Kiefer Sutherland. The pull of "home", both real and imagined, leads Kiefer and Meg back to small-burg with tragic consequences. There is a real 80's feel to this. Ennui and fear and neediness combine as America ostensibly does big things, a few people get really rich, and people like these characters instinctively know that most people, especially ones like them, have fewer prospects than their parents. Unlike me, the movie is not at all didactic, so check it out as one of the more outstanding "feel-bad" movies I've ever seen.

Kiefer Sutherland had a weird choice of roles in the early 80s, and quite a few times, he played wierd characters in often depressing movies. Promised Land is one of them.

The story of Promised Land focuses on some post-high school small town residents who, although they possessed some potential for greatness, their lives never seem to be going anywhere, or at least don't go the way they anticipate. Hancock (Jason Gedrick), who was the town's glorious athlete as a high school basketball player, now spends his days at a thankless job, doing street patrol as a cop. Both he and his girlfriend, Mary (Tracy Pollen) seem to young and rambunctious (at least Gedrick does) and always wanting more than their quick introduction into suburban, Middle class life.

Hancock's friend Danny (Sutherland) is his former high school classmate, a weak and quiet guy who returns to his depressing little town with his wild (and annoying) new wife, Bev (Meg Ryan), who seems to find her husband to be a suitable massicist target. Danny, too, is reminded of better times he may've had (he's not a dumb kid, either), and fears what lies ahead as the town elicits reminders of the ambitions he had, now lost. Of course, if you know movies like this, the story will show no silver lining.

If you like this movie, perhaps you might try searching out 1969, another early Sutherland title that is something along the same lines, but obviously, it is a period drama.