I’d say roughly half my list of the year’s 20 best films will be made up of documentaries by the time the year is through—somewhat because this year’s studio crop hasn’t been strong, but mostly because documentaries like Rachel Boynton’s “Big Men” are making a case for what documentaries can do better than scripted films: show us the nuts and bolts of not only what’s going on the in the world but why it’s going on by letting actual people tell their own (unscripted) words, which sometimes means letting them tie their own noose.
“Big Men” is an exciting insider look at the cultivation of an oil field in Ghana, the first commercial oil find in the country’s history. A relatively-small Dallas-based oil company called Kosmos has the rights, but starts coming into direct conflict with the newly elected government of Ghana, and from there the film tells us a lot about the oil business, first world companies and third world governments, “the resource curse,” and even illuminates exactly what can go wrong with a rising country’s oil industry in a side trip to Nigeria that shows exactly what Ghana doesn’t want to happen. [I’ll admit I didn’t know much about oil bunkering except the term itself, and this doc shows exactly how it’s done, and even includes interviews with the militants that wrongly take the majority of blame for it.]
Boynton clearly gained the trust of everyone on-screen (almost all of them men), and she doesn’t draw easy conclusions, preferring to let her subjects tell their own stories. [The lone exception: the eventual-president of Kosmos Energy, a British guy named Bryan something or other, who’s nervous enough to be annoying, and barely says anything worth hearing.] Everyone wants to be a “big man,” from the Dallas oil men to the Ghanian government officials to the money guys in New York who are really bankrolling the whole thing, and the film’s startling core truth (set up from the opening quote from greed-is-good “economist”/”philosopher” Milton Friedman) is that the selfishness that rules Africa’s politics is the same as the selfishness that rules the American economy. The film talks about the “every man for himself” African mentality, but that individual divineness now sounds an awful lot like what we consider an economic virtue. Grade: A