Kick-Back Friday: July 2010 Archives

On Saturday. No good excuses.

To watch The Heiress (1949), based on the play of the same name, which is based on the Henry James novel Washington Square, is to engage in an exercise of contrasts. To wit:

• Contrast the dowdy Catherine (Olivia de Havilland) with her father's ideal of womanhood: Catherine's socially accomplished, dead mother.
• Contrast the overt contempt of Catherine's father for Catherine with the cloaked abuse of Catherine's suitor, Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift).
• Contrast de Havilland's old-school mugging with Clift's subtler method acting.*
• Contrast Catherine's restrictive 19th-century bun with Morris's bon-vivant locks.
• And so on...

It's also worth noting that more contrasts are possible by watching the deftly filmed Washington Square of 1997, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh as Catherine, Albert Finney as Catherine's father, and Ben Chaplin as Morris. Leigh, in particular, adds several effective layers to Catherine's developing character that are absent from de Havilland's two- or three-note execution.

* de Havilland wins, if only because mugging is so hard to ignore.

The White Ribbon

(2009): Oh those Germans. Or Austrians. Whatever. And their frivolity. Not.

In austere and exquisitely still frames of retrofitted black and white, director Michael Haneke unfolds his story of anonymous evil deeds in a farm village on the cusp of World War I. Cryptically narrated in retrospect by the town's sympathetic, if ineffectual, schoolteacher (who's not even sure he's remembering correctly), the story reveals the stark brutality of paternal figures, suggesting that the perpetrator is an adult. But the innocence of the town's oppressed children cannot be assumed. Brutal adults can bear brutal children.

To celebrate BP's sealing of the Macondo well,* jump into the big, black tarry pit of oil-company litigation by watching Crude. The 2009 documentary by Joe Berlinger is an account of a the sticky, interminable class-action suit brought by Ecuadorians against Texaco (now owned by Chevron). Predictably, and primarily because we're considering a documentary here, it is a very plaintiff-friendly account of the protracted and ongoing legal proceedings that are anything but clear-cut. Just perform a search of the Google News archives with "Chevron" and "Ecuador," and you'll get an idea of how really, really complicated things are.

The story relayed in Crude, however, is comparatively straightforward—and deceptively simple. It begins when Texaco discovered oil in the area of Nueva Loja in northeastern Ecuador in the 1960s. In conjunction with Ecuador's national oil company, Petroecuador, Texaco launched full-scale production in the 1970s by thoroughly mining the area. As was oil business as usual, the massive amounts of drilling waste were disposed in superficial pits—which the resident Ecuadorians claim tainted their drinking and bathing water (obtained from nearby streams and rivers) and caused multiple ailments, including cancer. The plaintiffs are asking for $27 billion.

The corporate side of the story, which Berlinger does reveal, however impersonally, is that Texaco transferred ownership of the oil field and its production to Petroecuador in 1990 and spent millions cleaning up the waste pits under the direction of the Ecuadorian government. According to Chevron, which bought Texaco in 2001, the Ecuadorian government released Texaco of any liability once the waste pits were cleaned up to the government's satisfaction. Chevron also denies that there is an increased risk of cancer or cancer-related death in Nueva Loja residents, when compared with their countrymen.

Featured in the plaintiffs' David-versus-Goliath cause (as it is billed repeatedly in the movie) is a young, modest Ecuadorian lawyer, Pablo Fajardo, who is aided by a tenacious or insufferable (depending on your viewpoint) American lawyer, Steven Donziger. Donziger is a world-class grandstander (at least when the camera's rolling) and a seeker of high-level publicity (either for himself or the suit, it's not always clear). On a few occasions, Berlinger shows the frustration or outright umbrage that Donziger's constant 8-cylinder attitude produces in his adversaries and, at least on one occasion, his Ecuadorian allies.

Donziger becomes the means by which Fajardo is featured in a very sympathetic Vanity Fair article, which becomes the springboard for introducing Fajardo and his cause to the new Ecuadorian president, Rafeal Correra, and Trudy Styler, wife of Sting. Berlinger does gets a nod for including a segment in which Styler visits an unidentifed Ecuadorian tar pit (the reponsibility of which, mind you—Texaco or Petroecuador—is completely unclear). In the segment, the publicity-minded Donziger pulls Styler aside and tells her to mention "Texaco" as much as possible on film. Whether it is the intention of Berlinger (and what does that matter anyway?), the viewer hopes that Donziger will not pollute the simple Fajardo with Western celebrity. Thanks to Donziger's publicity efforts, Fajardo ended up hanging out with Sting at the 2007 Live Earth concert and was honored with CNN's Hero Award and the Goldman Prize.**  

What Crude ultimately prompts (besides repugnance for Donziger) are a number of questions that attempt to flush out a more even-handed and accurate account of the events that led to and inform this litigation. Namely...

• Do Ecuadorian residents of Nuevo Lajo, in fact, have an increased incidence of disease generally and cancer specifically? The pathetic, heart-wrenching cases presented in Crude shouldn't be sufficient for evidentiary purposes (but they probably will be). According to a PubMed search, there are a number of medical articles suggesting that the Nuevo Lajo Ecuadorians are at greater risk of certain diseases, but these positive studies are also authored by the same Ecuadorian investigators and apparently haven't been replicated by independent sources.
• If Neuvo Lajo citizens have an increased incidence of certain diseases, can they be linked to chemicals leaching from the remaining, uncleaned waste pits?
• If so, who created or has responsibility for these waste pits? Chevron or Petroecuador? (It is undisputed in Crude that Petroecuador has a dismal environmental record.)
• Can a fair trial be conducted in Ecuador, where judicial and political corruption seems to be the norm instead of the exception? While judicial corruption is highlighted briefly in Crude (and to the plaintiffs' advantage), more widespread charges have been made by Chevron against a court-appointed expert, the formerly presiding judge, and Donziger himself. (Although Crude revealed that the presiding judge was removed from the case, Berlinger did not explain why.)
• If the plaintiffs prevail in their suit, who gets the money? Crude hints that much of the cash will go to attorneys (eg, the Philadelophia firm of Kohn Swift and Graft, which is funding the plaintiffs) and the Ecuadorian government.

N.B.--No matter how unduly influenced Styler may have been by the bulldozing Donziger to believe that Texaco/Chevron is responsible for the current mess in Nuevo Lajo, it is to her (and Sting's) credit that their organization supplied local families with rain-water cisterns--which the Ecuadorian government is apparently unwilling or unable to do.

* However temporary.

** It should be noted that Donziger approached Berlinger to make Crude, although this fact is only revealed in recent news coverage of the suit.

I'll forgo this week's obvious recommendation: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009), which was just released on DVD. The movie is undeniably engaging. (What serial-killer tale isn't?) But the story, at least as executed on film, simply isn't good enough or clever enough or sufficiently well executed to justify or sustain several explicitly violent scenes and images, most of which are sexually brutal.

Instead this week's KBF is Panic in the Streets (1950) from director Elia Kazan.

After an unidentified murder victim shows up in the coroner's office with pneumonic plague, a government health officer (Richard Widmark) and a police captain (Paul Douglas) reluctantly pair up to thwart an epidemic. Their ultimate task: to find the victim's killer (or killers), who might spread the disease or die of it.

Because this is an Elia Kazan joint, character dynamics approach the importance of plot, and several new actors—namely Walter Jack Palance, Zero Mostel, and Barbara Bel Geddes—get to flaunt their emotive talents.

One brief, callous and self-serving act in particular (which is perpetrated by Palance's character) is all the more shocking and effective because the movie (unlike The Girl...) doesn't repeatedly assault the viewer with technicolor carnage.

On the heels of the absolutely wonderful I Know Where I'm Going (1945), another film from The Archers.

Britain's second most-beloved movie of all time (if one film poll is to be believed), A Matter of Life and Death (1946) was finally (finally) pounded out on DVD last year. David Niven is a WW2 pilot who attempts to avert a certain, imminent death while falling in love with an American radio dispatcher (Kim Hunter). Like Heaven Can Wait (both versions) and The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), A Matter of Life and Death concerns the fanciful struggle between the desire to continue an earthly existence, with all its ephemeral virtues, and the demands of mortality, the gods, or whatever you want to call it.

The distinctiveness of this movie lies in its juxtaposition of a black-and-white afterlife against a very technicolor existence on Earth (in a wry homage to The Wizard of Oz); the adherence to intricacies of British jurisprudence (even in the afterlife); and the attempt to weave in a neurologic disorder* (somewhat dubiously, I might add) to explain Niven's visions of his afterlife courier, an executed French aristocrat. The courier, or Conductor, as he is called, has got to be one of the most bizarre filmic oddities around, both visually and in personality—even by the very liberal standards of eighteenth-century French nobility.

* Chronic, adhesive arachnoiditis due to a previous head injury.