Crude

Directed by Joe Berlinger

At the IFC Center

Runtime: 105 min.

AT SEVERAL POINTS during Crude, the zealous new documentary about the 14 years of litigation that brought Chevron oil company to trial for environmental destruction it wreaked upon the Ecuadorean Amazon, director Joe Berlinger almost goes into detours that detail the complicated phenomena behind the human rights industry:

1) activist and Riverside Drive resident Steven Donziger, who coaches the legal and social campaign on behalf of Ecuador’s poor.

2) Ecuadoran lawyer Pablo Fajardo, who represents the local plaintiffs.

3) Philadelphia legal firm Kohn, Swift and Graf, who financed the case.

4) Human rights group Amazon Watch, who monitored Chevron’s offenses.

5) Public relations expert Ken Sunshine, who arranged mainstream exposure with a story in Vanity Fair.

6) Trudi Styler, founder of Rainforest Foundation, who makes the Ecuador case part of her mission and invites Fajardo to a globally televised charity concert.

These background specifics make Crude more interesting than a feel-good, special-pleading, bleeding-art exposé. There’ve been so many platitudinous advocacy documentaries lately—from the convenient “truths” of An Inconvenient Truth to the white-collar smugness of No End In Sight—that another would be a bore.The best thing about Crude is that from its blunt title it explores an ugly metaphor for the self-satisfied motives (“pursuit of pure profit”) that are behind corporate exploitation, government bureaucracy as well as Good Samaritan narcissism.

(There’s even a sequence about “change” with Obama-like shots of Ecuador’s newly elected handsome young president, Rafael Correa.) Berlinger’s finest scene is either a mother crying about her young daughter’s cancer while a rooster obscenely squawks in the background, or Donzinger arguing with his Ecuadorian clients. (“Am I a little bit right?” he asks. “No. If you speak at another volume you will be more right.”) In this year of great, uncompromised and unco-opted nonfiction like Anvil:The Story of Anvil,Tyson and Sex Positive, docs must break through class assumptions and mythologies of righteousness—like the David-vs-Goliath mantra repeated in Crude.

Being on the correct side, which is not necessarily the anti-corporate side—although institution-funded filmmakers often think so—insults our capacity for distinguishing empathy from pity; humane duty from condescension. (When native Ecuadorians complain about the modernization, you wonder what they think about their eyeglasses.)

Certainly Crude’s liberal zealotry is more honorable than the limousine liberalism of Soderbergh’s Che. Crude is about the hard work put into resolving crises, where Che merely romanticized dead Communism. Berlinger reveals his sympathies through his filmmaker instincts: Crude touches all manifestations of oil greed which P.T. Anderson avoided when making his contemptuous anti-American pseudo-epic There Will Be Blood. Anderson kowtowed to trite anti-Bush cynicism, not even doing justice to the muckraking source novel, Oil!, by Upton Sinclair. Blood was trendy, Crude is aggrieved.

Instead of rousing one’s inner hippie, Crude revels (perhaps inadvertently) the many ironies involved in big-time activism: From the usual suspects—NPR, Air America and Democracy Now—that counter the Chevron shareholder’s reports, to the Vanity Fair sequence that acknowledges the public relations games played with a socialite magazine.This is how “news” happens. Donzinger calls it “a paradigmshifting breakthrough article that is going to change the case for us!” Berlinger’s cut to Leo DiCaprio on VF’s Green Issue cover helps pinpoint liberal media’s fantasy that it is as subversive as the old radical rag Ramparts.

Fajardo laments, “I wish there had been a photo of one sick family,” in the Green Issue. And when well-meaning Trudie Styler, founder of Rainforest Foundation (and Sting’s wife), comes on, even Farjardo’s convictions and Berlinger’s early scenes about native culture and ancestry get swept up amidst hubristic hubbub.

As The Police’s ersatz reggae hit, “Message in a Bottle,” became Crude’s theme song, I thought back to Bryan Ferry’s great 2002 track, “Cruel,” where a tom-tom beat ingeniously used Native American plight to focus on cosmic troubles from the workplace, the lonely heart to the ozone layer. Ferry didn’t applaud his own concern, but asked, “Why in the world are you so cruel?”—a world-encompassing plaint from Ferry’s human rights avant-garde (“Nobody cares. Nobody but me and…”) Go and listen to it. That’s the kind of to-the-point alertness and devastating humility most political docs lack. They fall short of being useful works of art.