Crude tells the story of Amazon villagers struggling to sue Chevron for dumping billions of gallons of oil near their villages.  It’s a story that’s gone unheard in America for too long.  Too bad no one’s going to see the movie.

When most of us hear “oil spill”, we think gooey black death on the surface of the ocean.  But Crude, a documentary directed by Joe Berlinger, focuses on a major oil spill on land—the great, wobbling black pits dumped by Chevron in the Ecuadorian Amazon.  The film, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and is only now getting limited screenings across the country, tells the story of the legal drama over those billion of gallons of oil.  But the real story of Crude isn’t the environmental catastrophe—it’s the lengths the poor villagers have to go to compete with the rich oil companies.  Along the way, the “good guys” learn to stretch a buck, grab some media attention and exploit the power of celebrity.  Perhaps Berlinger could have learned something from the plucky lawyers he follows.  Crude is a capable and important documentary, but without slick production values and a media juggernaut behind it, the film has been playing to a lot of empty theaters.

Which is not to say Crude is a bad film—far from it—and it tells a story that Americans haven’t heard nearly enough about.  From 1972 to 1993, Texaco, now owned by Chevron, dumped billions of gallons of oil in tributaries of the Amazon River in Ecuador.  Cancer rates among the local people soared.  Crude follows the class action lawsuit brought by 30,000 villagers against Chevron through two lawyers—Pablo Fajardo, a young Ecudorian lawyer who’s never tried a case before, and Steve Danzinger, a street-smart schmoozer from the U.S.  Berlinger is patient with the myriad details of the case, spooling out new information only as it comes up in the lawyers’ arguments.  While things feel a bit jumpy at times, Berlinger manages to fit a lot into this two hour documentary and still deftly maintain the tension of a legal drama.

The film is certainly compelling.  Where it falters—and, I suspect, why it hasn’t gotten wider release—is in making the movie entertaining rather than simply enlightening.  Crude is almost exclusively composed of jerky, grainy camera shots of people’s faces.  Music and humor, which have become a key component of many commercially successful docs like No Impact Man and pretty much all of Michael Moore’s ouvre, are absent in Crude.  Berlinger also missed a major opportunity by not taking more beautiful shots of the exotic landscape of the Amazon.  And save for one lovely song in the opening, the indigenous people the lawyers are fighting to save get next to no screen time, unless they’re talking about cancer.  As a filmmaker, Berlinger should know that it’s often images that truly capture heart and minds.  Iconic photos of oil-coated seagulls and grime-caked fish have made ocean oil spills household words in the U.S.  Berlinger should have visually captured the ecological destruction in Ecuador.  But except for some wisps of oil on the water and a couple dead chickens, we’re left taking the villagers’ subtitled word for it.

That leaves Crude a well-told story sorely lacking in pizzazz.  Without it, Crude can’t compete commercially with the gorgeous images of Planet Earth, the funny family drama of No Impact Man, or the extreme gonzo journalism that gave the independent doc The Cove a media boost.  No Impact Man, after all, has been playing at local theaters for months.  Crude, which grossed $80,000 in its first four weeks, is in Boston for just two weekends, at the Museum of Fine Arts—not exactly a big-time movie venue.

This is especially ironic because the film itself is practically a guide to how the little guy can get noticed.  Danzinger, the American lawyer, is well aware of the odds they’re up against, and he knows how to play the game.  He dictates lines to Amazonian villagers testifying in the US and yells until he gets the President of Ecuador to visit the oil pits.  “We still haven’t found a way to break through the consciousness of the American people,” he laments, even though the case had been going on for 13 years by then.  Danzinger’s coupe d’etat, and the climax of the movie, is when he gets Trudie Styler, the wife of Sting, to visit the afflicted villages.  This leads to the movie’s most nauseating moments, when Police sings “Message in a Bottle” over a montage of puffy-lipped and vacant-eyed Styler visiting oil pits and Amazon villages.  The scene is both a stomach-turning paean to celebrity and a reminder of how important notoriety and cold hard cash are for any cause.  No one, apparently, really cares about Amazon villagers dying of hydrocarbon-induced cancer unless Sting’s wife is there prancing around them with her immaculate white parasol.

Unfortunately, judging from the meager turn-out of seniors and a few students at the Museum of Fine Arts when I saw this movie, it seems that most people still don’t care.  It’s a shame Berlinger couldn’t have found a way to make this story punchy enough to get a wider release.  The tragic story of 30,000 poor villagers being poisoned by an American corporation is a bitter pill for American audiences to swallow, and Berlinger hasn’t done much to sweeten it.  And so the trial will probably go on for another 10 years, barely acknowledged by the American public, exactly as Danzinger feared.