Film Review: Crude

Title:              Crude
Director:             Joe Berlinger
Producer:           Liesl Copeland, Ted Sarandos, Joe Berlinger, Jon Kamen, Robert Friedman,
                                Frank Scherma, Justin Wilkes (Exec)
                                Michael Bonofiglio, Joe Berlinger, J.R. DeLeon, Richard Stratton
                                Rachel Dawson, Daniel Luciano, Leslie Luciano, Danielle Pelland (Co)
Cinema:               Juan Diego Perez
Editor:                 Alyse Ardell Spiegel
Music:                  Wendy Blackstone
Sound:                 Edward L. O’Connell
Year:                     2008 (100 minutes)

Synopsis: Three years in the making, this cinema-verite feature from acclaimed filmmaker Joe Berlinger (Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost, Metallica: some Kind of Monster) is the epic story of one of the largest and most controversial legal cases on the planet. An inside look at the infamous $27 billion “Amazon Chernobyl” case. Crude is a real-life high stakes legal drama set against a backdrop of the environmental movement, global politics, celebrity activism, human rights advocacy, the media, multi-national corporate power, and rapidly-disappearing indigenous cultures. Presenting a complex situation from multiple viewpoints, the film subverts the conventions of advocacy filmmaking as it examines a complicated situation from all angles while bringing an important story of environmental peril and human suffering into focus.

Review: Crude is the story of the epic lawsuit between 30,000 indigenous residents of the Ecudorian Amazon rainforest and Texaco/Chevron, who is accused of systematically polluting a portion of the rainforest the size of Rhode Island. The film is very interesting and very well done.

To start out with, the director, Joe Berlinger, had a very difficult task. The story behind Crude is both long and complicated. Berlinger could have “dumbed down” the story to make the story easier to tell, but he didn’t. Instead, he told the story, including all of the twists and turns, in a way that was accessible and understandable to the audience.

I think it would have been very easy to simply make this a film about how a big corporation took advantage of a chiefly uneducated, poor populace in the middle of the rainforest. But instead of demonizing Texaco/Chevron, Berlinger played it pretty even. It’s fairly obvious that Texaco/Chevron created a mess that they didn’t clean up, but as the film shows, that isn’t the entire story. Making Texaco/Chevron a sympathetic charater in the film was impossible considering their action, but Berlinger didn’t taking the easy route of piling on them either. In my opinion, he was very fair to them (sas fair as he could be) throughout the film.

Crude is a terrific film that sheds a great deal of light on a very sad story of environmental ruin, human misery, and the behavior of a corporate giant .

(3.5 out of 5.0)