In the 1960s, Texaco started drilling for oil in the Amazonian rainforest in Ecuador. Texaco pulled out in the early 1990s, handing the concession to the state oil concern, PetroEcuador. In 1993, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Texaco on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadoreans, claiming that the company's environmental record on their land left something to be desired. By the time Berlinger's film picks up the story in 2006, the lawsuit against Chevron (which acquired Texaco in 2001) was only just beginning, as Chevron had killed nine years just fighting over jurisdiction, and people were still dying.
Berlinger's camera focuses repeatedly on images of oily rainbow shimmers on jungle waterways and birds trapped in cocoons of tarry mire. Then there are the children who, growing up in the jungle villages built on oil-saturated land, are often covered in painful rashes, many developing cancer at shockingly young ages. The cost of energy is rendered here in angry red lesions, teenagers with leukemia, and parents with no other option but to continue washing and cooking for their families with toxic water.
To his credit, even faced with such heartrending scenes, Berlinger (whose previous films like Paradise Lost were carefully rendered with multiple viewpoints) makes at least an effort to get the opposing side to come on camera and explain why none of this was their fault. The company's spokespeople (one slick managing counsel and a dissembling environmental scientist) don't do themselves any favors, though, coming off as either desperate spin-merchants or out and out fabricators. After a while, Chevron seems to stop bothering altogether to deny whether their old stomping grounds were polluted, instead trying frantically to shift the blame to PetroEcuador.
In addition to the (sadly) expected corporate malfeasance on display, Crude also effectively illustrates the terrible grind that such a lengthy process takes on the plaintiffs, who of course have nowhere near the resources of their foe. Chevron, facing a potential $27 billion award, can afford to expend untold resources on their defense, while the plaintiffs have to rely on a few unusually dedicated lawyers and nonprofit groups like Amazon Watch. While the film tries hard to make a couple of the plaintiffs' attorneys -- hard-charging American Steven Donziger and the quieter, more modest Ecuadorean Pablo Fajardo -- its heroic protagonists, it can't ignore the fact that this kind of case is driven by celebrity.
Cue the strange arrival late in the film of Trudie Styler, Sting's wife and co-founder of the Rainforest Foundation. Taking an interest in the case, Styler appears in the Amazon looking like a parody of the idle Western do-gooder, clutching a parasol and draped in scarves. Stylistically, it's an obnoxious turn of events, as Berlinger turns the film toward following Styler's involvement and the unctuous machinery of self-aggrandizing celebrity volunteerism (Live Earth, CNN Hero Awards, and so on).
But while Berlinger allows the film to get a little too star-struck, spending less time with the winningly humble patchwork alliance doing the lawsuit's hard work, Crude at least acknowledges the reason behind this shift. As one frustratingly poorly-attended press conference shows, the glitter of celebrity is sadly necessary for garnering any sort of attention, even for a blockbuster story such as this. A company like Chevron has all the time in the world, but the Ecuadoreans dying of cancer in their sludge-soaked jungle do not. Sometimes a photo op with Sting can't hurt.
