Crude (Sunday, September 27, 2009) (134)

Joe Berlinger is an immensely talented filmmaker. His movies Brother's Keeper, Paradise Lost and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster are among the best documentaries of the last 20 years. He takes compelling stories and turns them into amazingly sober narratives, frequently more compelling than if they had been created by a screenwriter.

Crude is a true story about rural, indigenous Ecuadoreans who are suing Texaco (now Chevron) over the massive pollution the oil company created and left when they drilled for oil in the Amazonian back-country from the 1960-1990s. The main person in the film is Pablo Fajardo, a poor Ecuadorean man who lives deep in the rain forest in the town of Lago Agrio and went to university and law school on scholarships from the Catholic Church. He filed a lawsuit in the mid-1990s against the oil company in conjunction with an American lawyer, Steven Donziger.

For almost a decade, Chevron delayed the trial with legal motions, and ultimately got the case sent to Ecuador, figuring it would be easier to control there with corrupt judges and a more fluid legal system. Donziger explains at one point that drawing the case out for decades and decades was in the interest of the oil company - who had virtually unlimited financial resources. The longer it took to get a ruling on the matter, the harder it would be (both financially and emotionally) for the David to fight this Goliath.

Throughout the film we travel with the two lawyers from Lago Agrio and Shushufindi in the Amazon to Quito, San Francisco, New York and London as they gather money and attention for their cause. We also see the entire trail - with lawyers for both sides, plaintiffs, the judge and scientific experts - visit the sites in the forest where there are massive pools of oil on the ground - where we see (toxic) water draining from the bottom of the lagoon and into a stream that gives drinking water to the people of the area.

What has always made Berlinger's films powerful are the amazing characters he finds and highlights. Fajardo is a good looking, bright and happy man who has a positive outlook on life, despite his Herculean challenge he faces. He has a magnetism that is nearly unparallelled in the environmental world (which, clearly, is part of the reason he was befriended by Sting and his wife and taken on a press tour of America during the Live Earth concert series in 2007)

Perhaps Berlinger's biggest problem with some of his recent films is that he specifically takes a side of right and wrong in the films -and leaves not much room for the viewer to disagree (this was also a problem in 2001 with his film Paradise Lost 2). One could argue that there is no such thing as 'unbiased' documentary filmmaking - that the director always has a point of view and can't help but tell the story in that voice - but this is more extreme than that, I think.

Berlinger says emphatically that Texaco created the toxic mess in Ecuador and didn't clean it up and should be held responsible for the present health issue facing the people who live there, and also clean up the mess. I have a hard time arguing against this - but at the same time the Texaco/Chevron people who speak on camera tell an equally compelling tale that much of the left-over waste was a created by the company who bought the drilling rights from Texaco in 1992. Berlinger, being an avowed supporter of the plaintiffs (as the double-meaning of the title suggests), gives very short shrift to this argument and doesn't explore if this is possibly true. I felt that I was supposed to dismiss these arguments and move on along with him, but I couldn't - rather, I ended up somewhat confused and frustrated about the course of events.

Overall this is a good movie, though it does not rank in the top tier of Berlinger's oeuvre. It runs a bit long and gets a bit off-topic (especially when it gets to the Live Earth festival). Still, it's a very bold and interesting story - and it does not at all feel like a 60 Minutes story (as a less interesting film and talented director might). I like this movie - I just wish a few of these wrinkles had been worked out.

Stars: 2.5 of 4