It has been called the "Amazon Chernobyl," its victims asking $27 billion for that which can never be recovered — the lives of their loved ones and the near-extinction of their culture. In the case of Aguinda v. Chevron-Texaco, filed in 1993, 30,000 Ecuadorans, many of them of indigenous tribes, claim that Texaco dumped over 18 billion gallons of toxic waste and almost 18 million gallons of crude oil into their water and land during decades of oil exploration. It's an environmental disaster that makes the Exxon Valdez spill look like a puddle, and what's truly shocking is that this was no accident; it's the plaintiffs' allegation that Texaco engineered their operations to drain into riverbeds. Many of the plaintiffs have cancer and their children birth defects that lead to early death. Chevron inherited the case when it merged with Texaco in 2001 and has been fighting it ever since.

It's into these muddy waters that Joe Berlinger (co-director of Brother's Keeper, Paradise Lost and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster) wades in Crude, which opens today at Real Art Ways, and what he brings to what would otherwise be a typical advocacy documentary is his sharp eye for character, his two stars the lead attorney, Pablo Fajardo, a 35-year-old former oil worker who still lives in poverty, and Steven Donziger, the lawyer who coaches the plaintiffs in the ways of American courts. If Donziger seems to hog the spotlight, it's because Berlinger has in this lumbering and impatient New Yorker the kind of character his films adore. The filmmaker's keen eye for the herdlike ways of the media is also in evidence: when Amazon Watch, a nonprofit aligned with the plaintiffs, holds a press conference piggybacking on an article on the case in Vanity Fair, no one shows up, but once Sting's wife Trudie Styler gets involved Fajardo becomes a media darling.

The press notes make frequent protestations that the film is not one-sided, but there is no way to walk out of Crude thinking that Chevron is less than diabolically evil, just as there's no way one could leave Some Kind of Monster without thinking that Lars Ulrich is a self-important twerp. No one takes Holocaust documentaries to task for not being evenhanded, and as Chevron shifts its tactics from arguing that the oil contamination does not exist to disclaiming responsibility for it, it's hard not to see this as colossal buck-passing of the most egregious order.