Crude - The Movie

We saw the movie Crude: The Real Price of Petroleum last night at the Bear Tooth Theater Pub.  It starts out with the woman in the picture singing a song of the death that oil meant to her Equadorian environment - death to people in her family, to the river, to their way of life.

There is a problem inherent in commenting on a documentary film.  While a film reviewer should first be reviewing the quality of the film as film, you can't help but be drawn into subject of the film as well.

The dilemma for me was this.  Part of me is outraged.  I know that this is not an isolated situation.  Anyone who was in Alaska in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez fouled Prince William Sound and stayed around to see how Exxon has dragged this case out for 20 years until a number of the plaintiffs have died, can't help but recognize Chevron's tactics in Ecuador.  And I've read enough to know that multi-national corporations ultimately are about making money, and while there may be people who consider themselves moral who work for these companies, that morality is compartmentalized so they can justify their continued work there, and ultimately, collectively, the corporations are totally amoral if not immoral.  Confessions of an Economic Hitman spells this all out.  The author even writes about going into the jungles of the Amazon to convince the indigenous peoples that the oil company would do them good.   So my basic reaction is to believe that - despite gaps in the arguments - ultimately this movie tells us what is basically the 'right' interpretation of events.

But as I blog, I recognize that people who have different world views from mine, may read this.  Since I don't have knowledge beyond the film about this particular situation (though I do in general) I feel a need to be able to justify however I come down on the film.  And there were parts of the film that made me groan.

The duck lying on its back, its feet quivering in what look like death throes, as the narrator talks about the water killing the villagers' animals just looked way too staged.  The point was probably true and they may well have seen this duck, but it was over the top for me.  And the kid holding the two dead chickens by the feet and then taking them into the brush and tossing them because they were contaminated - well in my mind I could  hear the director creating the scene and telling the kid, "OK, that's far enough, now toss them."  Yes, you use these kinds of visuals to make your points, but these just looked too staged for me. (Hey, maybe they weren't staged at all, but they looked like it.)

The director as an advocate rather than an objective observer isn't bad.  As an advocate, the film makers did offer the voices of 'the other side' as well as the voices they were supporting.  And I'd note that the short oil industry produced videos featured within the film were far more one sided than Crude.

I was particularly struck by one Chevron scientist in Houston who, in her very nice green dress, kept telling us there was no evidence that linked the illnesses to Texaco oil, that Texaco had cleaned up its sites before turning things over to the Ecuadorian petroleum company, and that if there had been any evidence of wrong doing, she would have let her bosses know immediately because she had the phone number of one of the key vice presidents.  In terms of scientific data, the film makers never disputed what she said.  But in terms of visuals and testimonials of villagers, one couldn't imagine that this scientist was anything but a shill for Chevron.  They never - in the film - asked her if she had ever been to the villages.  She didn't look like she had.  Did they cut out the parts where she talked about visiting the villages and seeing the leftover oil damage?

The film raises important questions about how a party 'proves' damage.  As one Chevron spokesperson said, there's no tool for dating whether this oil is from the time of Texaco or from the time of the Ecuadorian oil consortium.  What happens when there is no scientifically definitive way to prove something?  On the other hand, the film offers a great deal of anecdotal data to connect Texaco to the damage.  But the almost total lack of numbers supporting the villagers' case raises questions about whether these numbers exist.  Did they feel the numbers were too complicated to present in a film?  Do the numbers simply not exist?  (For example, they say the rate of cancer has increased greatly since the oil.  Chevron disputes this and says, in any case it's not the oil that's causing it.  Probably in this remote region there wasn't much data on the incidence of cancer, certainly not before oil.  But nobody says even this.)

Winning in court isn't necessarily about justice.  It's about how good your lawyers are.  It's about how provable your side of the case is.  It's about the political environment.  For many years,  government officials could be manipulated (and still can be) by multinational corporations backed by the World Bank's criteria for granting loans, and ultimately, by the CIA.  (Read Economic Hitman.) Raising the hopes of the plaintiffs was the election of President Rafael Correa, who became the first president of Ecuador to visit the oil disaster area.



So my evaluation of the film really does hinge on how convincingly Berlinger made the argument.  He definitely made the case that damage had been done and that the indigenous villagers individual lives and probably way of life had been destroyed.  But the question is not totally convincing - to the skeptical viewer - that Texaco (and thus current owner Chevron) is the responsible party. 

The film focused on the plaintiff's attorneys, a New Yorker and a local Ecuadorian, as they worked to build their case, raise money, and get publicity, including a spread in Vanity Fair and enlisting Sting and his wife Trudie Styler - who visited the villages - to raise money and awareness for them. 

Perhaps the lack of Hollywood slickness in the film redeems its faults.  After all, this was  clearly made in passionate belief in the cause, much in contrast to the cold, calculating style of the attorneys and other spokespersons for Chevron.  Chevron focuses on legal and scientific technicalities.  Berlinger presents personal local witnesses along with the visual evidence of the damage done.  You know, as you watch, that each Chevron spokesperson's annual income is more than all the villagers have made in their lifetimes and that they spend enough on one or two nights' hotel bills to pay the $500 cancer treatments a mother and daughter in the film get after an 18 hour bus ride each way to the clinic.

You can get a sense of what I'm talking about in the official trailer:
 




So, I've been mulling this around.  I didn't feel satisfied at the end of the movie.  This wasn't a high budget Hollywood movie.  Even Michael Moore surely had far more money for his latest few movies.  You can't compare this movie to one that cost 10 or 20 times as much.  But I haven't been able to find any mention of the cost of the movie.  

Most reviews online seem to be uncritically supportive of the cause.   The most 'establishment' comments I could find  were in an interview of the director Joe Berlinger in Foreign Policy,  a journal that doesn't normally review movies.  He said he originally didn't notify Chevron because he was working in a very lawless area near the Columbian border, and while he didn't think Chevron would hire a hit man, there were other locals with an interest in their Chevron salaries who might.

[Since I contacted Chevron,] our relationship has been interesting. Initially, they did not believe [I was trying] to do a fair and balanced film.
I tried to get them to let me do other things like sit in on their meetings.  I said, "Hey, take me on the toxi-tour" --  everyone calls it the toxi-tour, including Chevron -- "from the Chevron perspective and I would love to be on the ground with you at these sites, and you explain to me whose responsibility this is and how this happened." They denied that. Literally up until the [eleventh] hour they were friendly but not granting any interviews.
[The Sundance Film Festival deadline] motivated them, and [Chevron] agreed to do interviews. It was their idea to provide me with Ricardo Raez Vega, the legal architect of this case, and provide me with Sarah MacMillan [Chevron's chief environmental scientist].(brackets in the original)

He goes on to say that when he did the interviews, a Chevron film crew showed up to film him doing the interviews.  Another quote from the Foreign Policy interview caught my eye:

The filmmaker saw a chance to tell a story he thinks addresses a "moral responsibility" that transcends even the best legal argument.

That was, actually the sense I had.  And I kept on looking for other things to help me out here.  One could say that if I need to get all this background information, the movie itself didn't work on its own.  As a piece of film I think it had its share of imperfections, but as a piece of advocacy, it imprinted memorable images in people's minds that will stick and will reshape what they think when they see the Chevron logo.

But what ultimately convinced me was hearing Joe Berlinger talk about the film on the Alex Jones show.  (There are four YouTube videos.  I took short clips for the audio from 2/4 and 3/4.)  You can hear in his voice that this project was one he felt compelled to do because of a great injustice he saw.  And he acknowledges that he doesn't know for sure all the legal technicalities, but says this is such an enormous moral issue, that the story had to be publicized.  I really think the film would have been stronger had he inserted himself into either the beginning or the end of the film and said what he says on this clip. (Click on the yellow button with the black arrow.)

Joe Berlinger on Alex Jones show by AKRaven

I'm not smart enough to figure out whether Chevron should win or lose  the trial, you know, as you'll see in the film they've wrapped themselves up in enough legal arguments that who knows if the justice system can prevail, but from a moral standpoint it's just astounding that they would go into the backyard of these people and foul the place up.  And you walk around these indigenous villages and it breaks your heart. [At this point he gets interrupted for a station break.  The theme gets picked up later in the interview and I've added that after the break but didn't transcribe it.]

For me this helps explain what I saw as holes in the movie.  He wasn't arguing this legally, that would happen in the courts.  What he's doing is making the moral case that what Texaco/Chevron did is wrong and that they need to make amends, even if their lawyers were able to get Ecuadorian officials to sign off on their future liability.