Skip to main contentJoe Berlinger knew he would make Crude as soon as he spotted the can of tuna. He was three days into a trip to the Amazon basin, literally just off the boat—a canoe—when he saw Cofán tribespeople preparing a communal dinner from an industrial-sized tin of fish: "the kind of cheap, processed tuna that you would get at some bargain-basement restaurant supply company," he now recalls. Berlinger took notice of the absurdity. "Here we were, deep in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, amongst water-based people who have lived off the water for as long as anyone can remember, being forced to eat canned tuna because the fish in the river were all dead and diseased."
Berlinger has made a life of incongruities. He began his career in movies with Brother's Keeper, a 1992 documentary following the murder trial of an obscure New York farmer, and nearly sabotaged that career in 2000 when he left filmmaking partner Bruce Sinofsky and tried to leverage his nonfiction success into high-profile dramatic features—the result was Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. He recovered by finding Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield in group-therapy sessions; that discovery reunited him with Sinofsky and resulted in their best-known work, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. Now working solo again, Berlinger has dipped his oar into the most repetitive and hectoring of current film genres—the left-wing political activism documentary—and come up with something special. Against its title, Crude is distinguished by subtlety.
It's not that Crude doesn't provide plenty of fuel for outrage. Berlinger has taken his vérité approach and applied it to the environmental catastrophe of South American oil drilling. Crude examines the petroleum spillage in Ecuador (a slop 30 times larger than the Exxon Valdez wreck, with much of the oil pooled under people's homes and leaked into the water supply) and the ongoing lawsuit that will determine whether Chevron is legally responsible for thousands of dead babies and cancer cases. But Berlinger doesn't harangue. Instead, he documents the process of activism, showing the slightly unseemly effort by environmentalists to recruit celebrities (Sting's wife is a big catch) and manipulate media coverage. And he does something remarkable in an era of cinematic agitprop: He gives both sides in the trial screen time to make their case.
They present their arguments at the scene of the crime, in a series of field inspections where lawyers—including a zealous first-time plaintiff's attorney, Pablo Fajardo—stand astride the stench of oil pits, deriding each other in Spanish above the din of jungle insects. "It was very dramatic political theater," Berlinger says. It translates. These outdoor rhetorical battles have the feeling of a contemporary Scopes trial: just as sweltering, with as many cultural assumptions at stake. In Crude's most profound sequence, Berlinger updates a Michael Moore technique from Roger & Me, but to far more nuanced effect: He layers both sides' oratory over images of a Cofán woman taking her daughter on the weekly bus journey for cancer treatments. Whatever the verdict, the people of Ecuador have already lost.
"I think white guilt, more than anything, made me continue making the film," Berlinger tells WW. "And I'm glad of that white guilt. Because for me, this was kind of a wake-up call, the making of this film. Obviously it's about the lawsuit—but I think it's rather neutral with regard to the lawsuit. To me, there are much larger moral issues here at play. Many Americans from time to time have thought, 'Oh, that Denny's over there used to be a Cherokee village where people lived in harmony with nature.' But we think that our treatment of this country's indigenous people is somehow a thing of the past. But for the past 600 or 700 years, white people have treated indigenous people abysmally in the Americas, starting with the Spanish conquistadors up until now. The behavior of multinational corporations in the extractive industries in the Third World, in places like Ecuador, to me is just the late-20th-century/early-21st-century continuation of this trend: of complete disregard of indigenous people."
By refusing to contaminate the jury pool, Crude makes its moral case watertight. Berlinger's example brings to mind another fishing metaphor: Give audiences your ideas, and they will feel guilty for a day. Let them reach their own conclusions, and they might actually care long enough to make a difference.
opens Friday at Cinema 21. Director Joe Berlinger will answer questions at the 7 pm Friday premiere.
WWeek 2015