Movie Review: Crude

Crude is a documentary about a law suit against Texaco (now Chevron as of 2001) for environmental damage in Ecuador. It follows lawyers representing indigenous people of the Ecuadorian Amazon rain forrest who are facing extinction from high cancer rates and other heath issues that all seem to be caused by contamination from the oil industry.

Steven Donziger is a NY lawyer who's been involved with the case since 1993. The beginning shows him preparing the plaintiffs to testify in Houston and, what looks like press conferences in the jungle but might actually be Ecuadorian court fact finding missions. We hear about the cases are dragging out for years, and that Texaco, who first drilling in Ecuador in the early 1960s, claims no responsibility and the Ecuadorian courts are corrupt. A lot of time is spent on fighting about the science studies and who funded them and where the samples are drawn from.

It all felt insubstantial. It took over a half hour to find out that Texaco left Ecuador in 1991 and the oil fields were then taken over by PetroEcuador, Ecuador's national oil company. Texaco's claims are that they met the environmental regulations and passed inspections at the time by the Ecuadorian officials and that PetroEcuador had a poor environmental record. Now that may or may not be true and they may have bribed the officials, but it took way to long to get this information in the film.

Instead it showed a lot of sick children and oil soaked villages and rivers. We meet Pablo Fajardo, "grew up in poverty in the Amazon region, attending college and law school with the sponsorship of the Catholic Church. The Chevron lawsuit is his first case." He is the subject of a Vanity Fair article that brought the case to the attention of Trudie Styler, Sting's wife and an activist. We see her visit Ecuador and get a tour of the conditions of the people. She conducts several interviews and in one of the more telling scenes of the film, we see Donziger pull her aside and ask her to say the word Texaco more often. After a little bit Fajardo is brought to the Live Earth concert on 7/7/2007 and we see Sting introduce him to the press. Fajardo says he's never heard of Sting or The Police.

Styler then returns to the rain forrest and brings large plastic water collection barrels so the people can have clean drinking water. It amazed me that after so many years of problems, this is the first practical help given to the people. And it's petroleum-based. Other than this the most significant event seems to be the election of a new and younger president in Ecuador who seems to care more about supporting the case.

The film was ok but seemed superficial. I wanted to see less lawyering and more facts. Statistics about the number of well drilled and where the people lived. Maps would have helped. It took too long to find out about PetroEcuador and the plaintiffs never said why they thought Texaco was responsible and not PetroEcuador. That must come up in the court documents. When Donziger first shows Fajardo the Vanity Fair article, they laugh about the picture, but no one ever comments about the contents of the article. Yet it was the catalyst that got Styler involved and that brought the most impact to the people. I found that hopeful and yet disturbing.