CRUDE

Rating: 5

Click here to listen to the interview with Joe Berlinger (17:47).
The best moment in Joe Berlinger’s documentary CRUDE is when a slick Florida lawyer, attempting to make Chevron’s case that it isn’t responsible for the environmental catastrophe in the Ecuadorian Amazon mis-speaks. Eduardo Reis Veiga is going over, point-by-point, how Chevron cleaned up the jungle. He finishes by saying with as much indignation as he can summon, that for the people who are suing Chevron to say they didn’t is absolutely true. He quickly, and very smoothly says “untrue”, but the damage is done.
That moment also sums up the film’s themes. This isn’t just a story of right and wrong, it’s a story of money and media and, most of all, spin. The timeframe is the historic, and potentially precedent-setting, trial of the class-action suit brought by the indigenous people of Ecuador against Chevron for the environmental damage caused by oil drilling in the jungle. Chevron had the trial moved to Ecuador, and the camera follows the lawyers as the make their cases in the field where the judge in the case is inspecting the damage first-hand, and in the city where legal maneuvering is as important to the outcome of the case as any evidence presented. Chevron’s lawyer is smart enough not to deny the facts of the case. He acknowledges that there is damage, but he is quick to assign the blame for it to PetroEcuador, the company that took over the oil field operations from Chevron when the operations were nationalized, and the motives of the lawyers involved. Yes, he says, there is pollution, but there is no way to date the sludge brought up out of the ground and placed in front of the judge.
It’s a game of dodge ball, that includes Chevron’s chief environmental scientist maintaining that the cancer rates in the area haven’t increased, and that it’s not necessary to clean up everything in order to make the area safe. It all comes down to money. Chevron accusing the plaintiffs, and the plaintiffs’ lawyers of wanting a big payday. The plaintiffs wanting clean air, clean water, and medical treatment for what has happened to the local population living with the leftovers of Chevron’s drilling. On the other side, and featured in action and in interviews are Steven Donziger, the New York lawyer who has made this the fight of his life, and Pablo Farjado, one of the Ecuadorean lawyers on the case who himself grew up poor and exploited in the affected area. Together and separately they prepare legal briefs and witnesses who are poor, and unused to the city, much less a legal system that is so complicated. Their stories are heartbreaking, as is the footage of babies covered in rashes, parents and spouses talking about loved ones on their deathbeds, and wondering where they will get the money for cancer treatments for the ones that are still living.
By focusing on the trial, though, Berlinger makes this more than just a litany of injustice. He is chronicling the ugly side of the good fight. It’s about more than getting angry, it’s about working the justice system, which, it become obvious, is about more than having right and truth on one’s side. Finding money to continue the lawsuit despite Chevron’s deliberate delaying tactics. Using spin on both sides, with plaintiffs pitching the story to the media in order keep the case alive. It’s a tactic that brings Trudie Styler, and husband Sting’s associated luster, to Ecuador to shed the media spotlight on the problem, where she is taken aside in the jungle during a media event, and asked to mention Texaco as much as possible in interviews. It is crude, but it is also beating Goliath at his own game.
CRUDE is a well-chosen title for an extremely well-produced documentary. There is the crude oil itself that has done so much damage to the environment and the people. Then there are the crude tactics employed to win a case not on its merits, but on technicalities and sometimes smoke and mirrors. Contrasting that is Farjado, seeing his picture in Vanity Fair and wishing it could be that of a family that has been struck ill by the pollution, and that of the image that opens the film, an elderly Indian woman lamenting the loss of both her land and her culture. Berlinger insists that the audience remember them and that for all the legal shenanigans, it’s the humanity at its core that matters.
Click here for the DVD review of CRUDE.