Promised Land (1987) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) and Tuna

Promised Land is a "Last Picture Show" wannabe about young lives in a small town.

The four main characters are

• a high school basketball star who washed out in college ball, lost his scholarship, and came back to work as a cop in his podunk town, where he could still bask in some of his youthful glory.
• his cheerleader girlfriend, who was studying at a distant university, but was still pulled back to her small town by the warmth of family, her love for the ex-basketball star, and the memory of having been a very important person in the hierarchy of her small town society.
• a geek who had been a long-time friend of the jock and the cheerleader, who left town without graduating from high school, drifted through menial jobs, and finally married a crazy speed freak he had known for three days.
• the crazy speed freak.

All four characters seemed to be seeking a family unit that they couldn't quite find. The geek and the speed freak returned to the small town from Reno, both of them looking for a family, only to face the realization that the geek's bleak family life could not provide either of them with what they needed. For him, the reunion with his father was a severe disappointment, but for the speed freak, even a dysfunctional family seemed better than no family, and she wanted to build some kind of nest. They argued, and the result of their argument was a melodramatic tragedy which brought them back into the lives of the cop and the cheerleader.

Promised Land is a mediocre movie which seems to have a good movie hiding somewhere inside of it.

I guess it's a story about the failure of the American Dream, whatever that means. The plain truth of the matter is that in America, as in every other country, young people dream glorious dreams, then settle into less than glorious lives. With only a very few exceptions, people don't get a chance to live out their youthful dreams, and even those few who do achieve everything they dreamed about often find out that happiness does not accompany their achievements.

Immature filmmakers, however, love to tackle the grand subject of "America as Promised Land", the gap between the media conception of American life and the reality of everyday existence for average people. In the case of this filmmaker, he not only attempted to take on that weighty subject, but tried to do it with grand religious symbolism, in the rarefied atmosphere of fallen angels and religious hymns. This movie must show more angels than a Botticelli exhibition. There are even angels with broken wings! Oh, well, I guess that's part of being a young filmmaker, and not realizing that a good story will carry its own weight in terms of wider applicability, when and if people can see their own lives or familiar lives reflected in the characters.

This film would have worked much better without all the angel statues, and it certainly could have lost the cut-ins of Ronald Reagan speeches. The characters in the film didn't suffer tragedy because of the false promises and misrepresentations about America. There's no reason to believe that their lives would somehow have been better in another country, or with another, more compassionate President. In fact, the characters in this film were only about 20 years old, celebrating the Christmas vacation only a year and a half after high school graduation. That's a bit young to be a tragic failure, isn't it? At 20, one may have to re-adjust the vision of the future one had in high school, but that adjustment just involves setting a more sensible height for the bar, not wallowing in despondency and sorrowful longing for things past.

The most effective element of the film was the wintertime cinematography of the desolate wide-open spaces between Reno and Utah, stark imagery which effectively underscored the film's message. That emptiness, and the individual lost lives encountered on the way, set the proper mood far more effectively than the heavy-handed religious and political symbolism.