Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
10/30/09
We
live in our little box of reality with the illusion that 500 channels of
TV, the Internet and something like 1.5 bazillion publications at our disposal
has put the entire world at our fingertips. But that's just an illusion:
truth be told, there's so much going on at any given time we could never
hope to know even a fraction of the most pressing crises gripping the world
we live in. So we rely on those tiny windows of perception, an online,
televised and print media that's mostly parroting the same stories over
and over, and increasingly few of them about things of real consequence.
Crude, an impressive new documentary from Joe Berlinger, is primarily
focused on a legal battle between the indigenous people of Ecuador and
the Chevron corporation over a staggering level of fatal contamination
done to their water supply. But, even more interestingly, it's also
about the way a cause, even a just one, must be sold to compete for that
precious public and charitable attention that is the lifeblood of any uphill
struggle. Crude will educate you on the Ecuadorans crisis,
but it will also educate you on how you become educated about any issue
of global importance, and that's what makes this great little documentary
more than just another sad story.
In
the early 70's, Texaco struck a deal with the Ecuadoran government to exploit
their oil reserves and swooped down into a country filled with indigenous
people who didn't even know what the helicopters bringing the oil workers
were. They worked those fields for decades, finally departing when
Ecuador decided to keep all the oil profits for themselves by putting a
local company in charge. Left behind were not just the oil fields,
but staggering levels of contamination, leading to exploding cancer rates
and water literally unfit for man or beast. We meet New York attorney
Steven Donziger, brought into the case by local lawyer Pablo Fajardo, who
went to law school specifically because he'd grown up in this horrid, contaminated
world and wanted to fight back. Donziger and his efforts are funded
by a Philadelphia firm hoping to see a big payday at the end of a seemingly
endless trial. And while trying to maneuver their way through an
alien legal system with ever-shifting motives, they recognize that the
battle to keep their efforts underwritten and bring Chevron (which absorbed
Texaco in 2001) to the table requires publicity. A major coup in
that effort is the publication of an article
about the case in Vanity Fair, which in turn catches the eye of Trudie
Styler, the wife of music superstar Sting, who coordinates his charitable
efforts through their Rainforest Foundation. Her involvement and
a favorable new President in Ecuador just might shift the balance of power
back toward the Little Guy. But yet, Chevron experts keep appearing
to tell us the company is blameless and, in fact, cleaned up all contamination
years before. Who is to blame for the nauseating smell of oil in
Ecuador's drinking water, and will the guilty ever be held accountable?
I'm
going to start with what's wrong with Crude because so much is right
with it that I don't want to get bogged down. The film is focused
on the individuals involved in this battle to such an extent that the science
of what happened while Texaco was in Ecuador is needlessly hard to follow.
The result is a “he said-she said” argument between Fajardo, Donziger and
their associates and Chevron experts that lacks needed context. The
movie does a brilliant job of showing us the human cost of the contamination
that exists in Ecuador today, but this one letter
from Ms. Styler to Chevron employees I found on the Huffington Post illuminates
the question of how we know it was Texaco's fault far better than anyone
in the movie does. Berlinger the filmmaker chooses to observe events
in the most passive way possible, with no narration and only on-screen
titles to keep us in the loop of how events are shaping his subjects' actions.
When important things happen, they always seem to happen off-screen, and
if he couldn't get that footage, that's fine. But more of the people
themselves talking about the topics of those blurbs would have given the
movie considerable more narrative drive. We know it's a documentary,
so it's not going to hurt my sense of being a fly on the wall if the people
we're watching occasionally acknowledged they know there's a camera in
the room.
OK,
so that's where the last half-star went. Now, let's talk about why
Crude is a movie you really should see. For one thing, the
devastation of the indigenous people we meet isn't just a tragedy, it's
an ongoing fight you can do something about (the movie's official site,
linked below, makes it easy to make a donation to UNICEF's Amazon Clean
Water Project). The movie does a splendid job of putting a human
face on the way thoughtless corporate greed can destroy lives, and indeed
many of the people we meet now do virtually nothing but fight for their
lives against the effects of the contamination and work to pay to keep
doing so.
But
it's also a nifty real-life legal thriller about two mismatched attorneys
and their struggle to use what their two different worlds have taught them
to take on a completely alien legal system and the power of a global corporate
giant. Fajardo has won several global humanitarian awards for his
work, and he seems to be every bit the man you'd expect to do so:
totally focused, deflecting credit, wanting only to see the scales balanced
for the affronts that have shaped his entire life. In short, the
kind of man who'd probably never be able to get anything done without somebody
like Donziger, who has devoted years of his life to trying to right this
wrong, but does so with a totally Harvard-educated skill set that couldn't
make him seem less altruistic. I loved a scene that showed the legal
team trying to prepare some of the Ecuadoran people to make speeches about
their plight on the steps of a Chevron shareholders meeting. We hear
one of them; sincere, heartbroken, kinda rambling. Donziger tells
him in his native language what a good job he did and that they'll just
need a few tweaks. Then, in English, he addresses the room about
how horrible it was and that they need to write the speech themselves and
get the guy on board with what we ultimately hear: a focused, melodramatic
and TV-friendly speech that contains none of the sentiment of the original
address but will actually get people's attention. Chevron lawyers
hit over and over on the idea that the case is just a get-rich-quick scheme
by carpetbagging attorneys, and none of the American lawyers we see dares
suggest that they don't hope to be well-compensated for a win. But
if Chevron's trying to make money by doing wrong, it seems more than a
little hypocritical for them to challenge men trying to make money by doing
right. Watching Donziger work the phones and SELL this cause is fascinating,
because it's really no different than promoting a movie or a line of clothing.
Except that lives are on the line.
Ecuadoran
legal proceedings are unlike anything we'd see in a US court: the
trial takes place at the scene of the crime, with the attorneys and
experts showing the judge evidence they pulled right out of the ground
while a crowd of onlookers make the whole affair resemble a high-stakes
golf tournament. All of which sounds better than what we've got here,
except that the office-bound part of their system makes the US court bureaucracy
sound like the selfless creation of Mother Theresa. Lawyers can walk
in and out of judges offices and openly threaten them with consequences
to their careers if they don't rule a certain way (we watch both sides
do it), and judges can just come and go from cases, requiring the case
to essentially start over with the new jurist needing to read every word
ever filed before proceeding. Add to that the fact that the judiciary
sits at the pleasure of their government, and judges are often looking
as closely at how their leaders would prefer they rule as at the evidence,
and you have a recipe for gridlock and injustice against which the case
creeps ever so slowly forward.
Which
is why we need charitable intervention while awaiting a judgment that might
not come before my 50th birthday, and why Trudie Styler may be the movie's
most intriguing character. While she does work as an actress and
producer, Mrs. Gordon Sumner's day job seems to be a lot less time-consuming
than her famous husband's, making her the advance guard for his charitable
involvement in causes like this one. She carries herself with an
air of absolute authority and concern, and would seem to be “in charge”
in every room she's in, but it's fascinating to watch how she still makes
sure everyone knows that when she speaks, she's speaking for a celebrity.
Not that Farjardo's had time in his difficult life to pay a lot of attention
to the music scene: watch the adorable little nervous pause after
she invites him to Live Earth to see The Police, generally not a group
of people muckraking Ecuadoran attorneys want to spend time with.
But while the progress on the court case is glacial, progress on the charitable
front is fast. I mentioned the UNICEF donation link on the official
site above, and the movie makes a strong case for the quick positive impact
the water filtration tanks they're installing in areas like this one make
for people in the unthinkable position of having no clean drinking water.
Crude
sounds like heavy lifting, I know. I myself had to will my feet into
the car and to the theater. But Joe Berlinger has assembled the stuff
of heartbreak and hopelessness into a galvanizing, entertaining David vs.
Goliath story that leaves a person not only hopeful that the big stuff
will work out eventually, but understanding how they can help in small
ways that make a big difference in the meantime. And in a world ruled
by the celebrity/industrial complex, it gives one a better understanding
than ever of just how the wheels on that bus turn. |
