MOVIE REVIEW
Crude (2009)
David Gilbert/First Run Features
Environmentally-themed documentaries have been all the rage since Davis Guggenheim offered the
previously unfathomable revelation that Al Gore giving a PowerPoint lecture could
be made dramatic. In fact, multifaceted movies about our brewing natural
crises — once the forte of activists and special-interest filmmakers — have
become such a norm, that there’s a definite threat of oversaturation. This year
alone has produced “Earth Days,” “No Impact Man” and “At the Edge of the World,”
among others.
Yet
director Joe Berlinger keeps “Crude” — his crack at eco-themed issue oriented
filmmaking — from seeming passé. That’s because he’s chosen a voluble,
compelling subject: the ongoing law suit filed by Ecuadorean natives against
oil giant Texaco (now Chevron), alleging years of unmitigated pollution of their
waters and lands. Embedded in the story — which alternates between scenes of
lawyerly machinations, the compiling of sad stories of the victims and a
look at the media’s representations of the case — are enough intriguing
characters and moments of high human drama for it to function more like a piece
of effective fiction than a work of overwrought agitprop.
Mr. Berlinger,
best known for collaborating with Bruce Sinofsky on character-driven documentaries such as
“Metallica: Some Kind of Monster” and “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at
Robin Hood Hills,” has an openly expressed point of view here, but he never bludgeons
the audience with it. The filmmaker understands the value of driving home his
condemnation of the rape of the Ecuadorean landscape with visuals instead of
words. He does so with such images as a swooping shot over the Amazon’s mist
shrouded trees accompanied by an elderly woman of the Cofán indigenous people singing of the loss off their their way of life,
or a scene of a mother preparing to take her teenage daughter on a lengthy
journey for cancer treatment. At times the movie gets wrapped up in the legal
proceedings, and it follows what’s become a well-worn narrative progression.
Yet, its heart lies in a powerful place, among the abandoned natives poisoning
themselves with contaminated water because they have no other choice.
CRUDE
Opens on Sept. 9 in New York and on Sept. 18 in Los Angeles.
Directed by Joe Berlinger; director of photography, Juan Diego Pérez; edited by Alyse Ardell Spiegel; music by Wendy Blackstone; produced by Mr. Berlinger, Michael Bonfiglio, J. R. Deleon and Richard Stratton; released by First Run Features. In English, Spanish, A’ingae and Secoya, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. This film is not rated.
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