“DARK WATERS”: Scorched earth

Mark Ruffalo

Published December 5, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene

My rating: B+ (Opens wide on Dec. 6)

126 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

If in the New  Year America’s landfills are suddenly overflowing with discarded cooking paraphernalia you can blame “Dark Waters,” Todd Haynes’ fact-based examination of how DuPont, in developing Teflon, pretty much poisoned the world.

This legal procedural follows a decade long effort by Robert Bilott, an attorney whose firm counts DuPont as one of its major clients, to determine why first the cattle and later the people living around Parkersburg, West Virginia, began exhibiting bizarre birth defects, horrendous tumors and unexpectedly high death rates.

This isn’t the first time that Haynes have gone off on an environmental tangent. in 1995’s “Safe” he examined the plight of a woman who is literally allergic to just about aspect in modern life. But “Dark Waters” is unique in that it is the most straightforward, unambiguously non-artsy film in a directorial career marked by titles like “Far from Heaven,” “Velvet Goldmine” and “I’m Not There.”

In fact, the artsiest thing in the movie is its gray/blue palette…surely the sun sometimes shines in West Virginia?

Bilott, played with quiet intensity by Mark Ruffalo, is a big-city lawyer whose job is to defend chemical companies.  Then he’s approached by farmer Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp), an acquaintance of his grandma, who demands that the high-priced attorney investigate the death of more than 100 of his cows after they drank from a stream on his land.

The Tennant property  abuts a decades-old DuPont waste storage facility; almost from the get-go Bilott (and those of us in the audience) knows where this is going. The problem is proving it.

Matthew Michael Carnahan and Mario Correa’s screenplay (adapted from Nathaniel Rich’s magazine article) simultaneously focuses on Billot’s long search for answers and his personal journey, using what’s he’s learned representing chemical giants to go after them.

At the same time his singleminded devotion to the case threatens his marriage to Sarah (Anne Hathaway) and his job at a big Cincinnati law firm, where the partners (led by Tim Robbins)  only give him leave to pursue the Dupont matter in the hopes of getting a piece of a massive settlement.

Bill Camp, Mark Ruffalo

Not that the chemical giant will go down easy. When the court orders the company to provide documentation on the Parkersburg plant and its creation of a manmade chemical called C8, it responds by dumping on Bilott more boxes of paper — in no particular order — than he could read in a year.

Step by step, filing by filing, Bilott nudges the case forward, pushing through legal setbacks and personal trauma to make his case. At times he is opposed by many of the very West Virginians whose drinking water has been sullied — after all, DuPont is the region’s biggest employer.

Haynes has put together a strong cast — among the players are Bill Pullman, Mare Winningham and Victor Garber — but this isn’t an actor’s film so much as it is a storyteller’s challenge. Keeping audience interest in a knotty legal matter that stretches out over many years is no easy matter; Haynes pulls it off by establishing a growing sense of dread which comes to a head in a chilling postscript.

We learn in the closing credits that the poisonous chemicals developed to make Teflon are a kind of Frankenstein’s monster which, once in the human body, take up permanent residence.  Furthermore, scientists believes that 99 percent of Americans have been infected with the toxic Teflon cocktail.

This makes “Dark Waters” one of  the creepiest horror films of all time.

| Robert W. Butler

Read the original review and more reviews at Butler’s Cinema Scene