Austin Film Festival: 'Houston We Have a Problem'

It can be difficult to distinguish between bullshit and wisdom when oil men are talking. That's because, as Houston We Have a Problem makes clear, they're full of both.

Nicole Torre's documentary - which could also be titled A Couple Dozen White Guys Sitting Around Talking, as it's unsurprisingly quite the sausage party - uses a loosely applied timeline device to tell the story of the United States' energy ascendancy and demise from its natural seat of power: Houston, Texas, "The Energy Capital of the World."

If the film boasts a high concentration of oil company executives and wildcatters, it's mostly the better for it. Once we get past their initial, grating posturing, we learn something of their deep knowledge of and passion for their business, as well as more about the high risk tolerance required of the profession. Also on display is a dispassionate - some would say cynical - understanding of the political and social realms they operate in. "We don't really care where we get oil," says Huddleston & Co. Chairman B.P. Huddleston. "We just want oil, period."

Huddleston is the film's most interesting and emblematic character; it's he who conveys Texas' oil-camp history and company culture, the positioning of the Texas Railroad Commission to regulate rates of pricing and therefore production in the 1950s, and the inevitable waning of the state's star in the face of declining supply and OPEC's 1973 oil embargo, the nail in the coffin. Huddleston accomplishes this with a straightforward, efficient telling, avoiding sentimentality while seeming completely imbued with and accepting of the idea of oil's demise.

Houston We Have a Problem features a couple of other folks of the type usually labeled "characters": Clayton Williams - cartoonish but not atypical old-school oil man and onetime reviled gubernatorial candidate - and Joanne King Herring, the socialite and unlikely consul to Pakistan and Morocco who brought the Afghanistan situation to the attention Democratic Texas congressman Charlie Wilson after Republicans paid her no heed.

The film is most compelling when focused on personalities such as these, who convey the depth of their knowledge and uniqueness. It's less so when chatting with blander representatives of the current school, documenting the country's continued failure to make serious conservation inroads, or trying to convince us that the "new wildcatters" are excited about geothermal exploration and algae experiments - carried out as even the most stubborn of the old breed admit they're going to have to make renewable energy their new area of plunder. The latter - the call to sustainable arms - has been done better and feels a little obligatory here; where Houston We Have a Problem excels is in its poignancy - its capturing of the gods in their twilight, telling the most epic story they know.

Houston We Have a Problem screens Thursday, Oct.29, 6pm, at the Texas Spirit Theater.