Photo of the Day: November 27, 2009
Morning Roundup: Black Friday Edition
Car Pushed Into Anacostia River By Train
The Saturday Morning Post
In Vino Veritas
With the endless parade of legal dramas, small claims reality shows, and an entire network devoted solely to the wheels of justice, it's understandable if you've hit the point of fatigue for any sort of filmed courtroom experience. Improbably, director Joe Berlinger actually brings something new to the table in Crude, which looks at a long-running, multi-billion dollar class action suit involving 30,000 residents of the Ecuadorian Amazon on one side, and oil giant Chevron on the other. The residents claim that Chevron (actually, Texaco, whose legal liability Chevron assumed when they purchased the company) left millions of barrels of oil sitting in pits all along the villages lining the Amazon, contaminating the land and the water, and causing outbreaks of cancer, birth defects, and horrific skin conditions. The environmental impact is estimated to be many times that of the Exxon Valdez spill.
Crude is a courtroom drama that never actually sees the inside of a courtroom. After years of stalling and maneuvering, Chevron's lawyers managed to move the case from the United States to Ecuador, and it's as the proceedings are finally getting underway there that Berlinger and his crew pick up the action. But hearings aren't limited to wood-paneled chambers there, and the entirety of the legal arguments shown in the movie take place on site visits to contaminated areas, where the judge takes in the situation, and hears arguments from the lawyers and witnesses right then and there, with news crews and onlookers gathered around.
Berlinger spends much of the movie as a fly on the wall with lawyers from the plaintiff's side. Pablo Fajardo is an idealistic young Ecuadorian who has pretty much lived this case ever since graduating from law school. He is guided by Steven Donzinger, an activist lawyer from the U.S. advising the more inexperienced Ecuadorian counterparts on strategy. Over the course of three years, these two travel all over the world raising awareness for the case, eventually landing a disbelieving Fajardo his own feature profile in Vanity Fair's "Green Issue," and a private audience with Sting and his wife Trudie, who take up the cause of the destroyed lives and ecosystems.
The crew only gets this kind of access from the plaintiff's side, and it's not hard to guess on which side of this argument Berlinger stands. Keeping that in mind, it's to his credit just how balanced he attempts to make his film. In a welcome change from many recent documentaries with an activist bent, the director is never seen on camera, never heard on the soundtrack, and does precious little overt editorializing. While he doesn't have day-to-day access to Chevron's side, he does drop the verité style to give the company's legal and environmental representatives plenty of interview time to state their case.
In an even more impressive testament to his attempt at impartiality, he's more than willing to cast his primary characters in a negative light. Not Fajardo, who has a seemingly unimpeachable commitment to justice, and the sacrifice necessary to attain it. But Donzinger pretty much confirms and embodies every negative stereotype Americans hold about lawyers. He's pushy, calculating, rude even to the colleagues on his team, and just leaves a bad taste in the mouth nearly any time he's on screen. When the grandstanding defendant's attorney, during one of the court's site visits, calls into question the motivations of the legal team, it's an obvious attempt to deflect attention from the human suffering occurring within sight during. Yet at the same time, Donzinger comes off so poorly that it's hard not to wonder if he doesn't have a point.
Berlinger is so hands-off that at times one wishes the film delved a little further into the facts of the case in an independent fashion, rather than just relying on the constant he said/she said back-and-forth engaged in by both of the legal teams. Powerful as this treatment is, particularly in visits to the affected areas, one can't help but feel that a lot of questions are left unanswered. Questions that, if asked, might have created a fuller picture than the straight reportage provides.
Crude is now playing at E Street. Director Joe Berlinger will be on hand for tonight's 7:15 and 10:15 screenings.
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Does Berlinger explore the Ecuadorans government role in this documentary? It's quite fashionable to go after "big oil" these days, but who holds governments accountable for this mess?
Somewhat. The newly elected (at the time of filming) president of Ecuador does become involved at one point. And the main defense of Chevron's attorneys is that most of the damage was caused by Texaco's successor in the Ecuadorian oil business, Petrolecuador. Berlinger, rather oddly, never includes mention (that I noticed, at least) that Petrolecuador, which has an abysmal environmental record, is the state-owned oil company. Another part of the Chevron defense is that Texaco's environmental cleanup job before they pulled out of the country was monitored and signed of on by the government, which Berlinger does document quite well. Yet he never approaches the question of how well the government oversight of these projects works (or how susceptible to corruptibility it might be).
File all of the above into the "unanswered questions" I allude to in the last paragraph.
I attended the movie and Q&A last night. The Amazonian tribes got fucked. Their shitty/corrupt government(s) totally sold them out in the 70s and 80s. Ecuador is broke (and their 'judicial' system appears wildly inept and corrupt) and a case against PetroEcuador/Ecuador in Ecuador, probably not a winner...Chevron has money and is an easy boogeyman. The movie is 3/4 "look at the undeniably awful thing that happened" and 1/4 "Texaco can't prove they didn't do it! Give us $27 bn." Seriously, the most compelling part of the movie for me (which they gloss over as...quirky) is how ridiculous and useless the judicial system in Ecuador is. A fair trial there is very unlikely and a competent one is impossible.