Dark Waters

Dark Waters is a "grown-up movie" at a time when grown-ups can't agree on anything. Like half a dozen films before it, it focuses on the the pursuit of justice against a corporation polluting people. It should sound at least a little familiar because it's practically a remake of the 1998 legal film A Civil Action, while also sharing similar DNA to Erin Brokovich and other films. (There's even a sequence of the main character organizing a never-ending collection of files that looks straight out of All the President's Men.) In Dark Waters, the villainous corporation is DuPont, maker of Teflon. They may be poisoning everyone without their knowledge, but they're "good people", as we're told, being the community's largest employer.

Dark Waters is likely to find, though, that in the twenty-plus gap between this film and A Civil Action, hyper-partisanship has risen so much that many viewers simply won't buy the film's arguments. The political gap between the left and the right has risen by more than twenty points since 1994. This is not inherently a bad thing, but it inevitably will make the film seem less urgent and less relevant. 

Mark Ruffalo, deliberately flabbier than his Hulk days, is the real-life environmental lawyer Robert Bilott. He is an attorney for the Ohio-based law firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister, where a prominent portrait of Ohio senator Robert Taft, son of William Howard Taft and one of the firm's most prominent lawyers in its history, hangs in the reception. One day, a meeting is interrupted by a West Virginia farmer named Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp), who knew Robert's grandmother. Tennant is desperate for help, as his cows appear to have been poisoned; they have black teeth, enlarged organs, and are dying of cancers. Tennant's farm has become a grave yard for almost two hundred dead cows. Those that still live have become violent. Bilott takes some convincing, but he eventually decides to help Tennant by representing him. It is the beginning of a rather timely pursuit, one that will take more than a decade.

Camp is given heavy eye brows and free rein to make some noticeable choices. "Ya blind, boy?" is one line that is really hammed up by the usually much more reserved Camp. Victor Garber plays the DuPont executive dripping with banality of evil until he yells "hick!" at Robert when confronted and sued to make the audience really despise him. Tim Robbins, who plays the senior partner at Taft and Robert's supervisor, does a mostly decent job; his character basically supports Robert's quest to bring justice, but then he delivers an annoying speech featuring wannabe calls-to-action that seems so out of line with the film's reasonably measured approach that maybe Robbins, notoriously liberal, wrote it himself.

But the biggest disappointment in this film's decisions for its cast is to give Anne Hatheway a throw-away role. She plays Sarah, Robert's wife, who gave up her own legal career to take care of their house and raise their three boys. The film may think it's giving Hatheway a lot to do and "agency", but it isn't. Sarah is the same as virtually every wife portrayed in this type of film: supportive, but only until it starts to put a strain on their relationship. Robert starts to become obsessed with his work, barely speaking to the boys, and taking pay cuts. She's there to lecture him about this, but the film doesn't really care about her perspective, for we are meant to sympathize with our persistent, low-key hero. Her character only adds to the personal stakes the male protagonist faces. "How'd it go?" she dutifully asks him, as he places his defeated head on her shoulder and cries. Dark Waters is clearly a "great man" film, focusing almost solely on the work of one environmental lawyer and minimizing every other contributor in the fight. This makes it less appealing than it could have been.

Dark Waters is more or less a smart movie with an accurate condemnation of self-regulation and the evil acts corporations can commit, but there's a lot of liberal-splaining in this film, as expected, and while it is an important message, many audiences will likely turn away in these hyper-partisan times. The challenge for the studio was to present it to conservative members who could buy into the call for action. This is possible; just look at how toxic sludge killing their dogs turned many senior citizens in Florida into eco-warriors. But the movie passes on the challenge, or at least fails it. Some moments will make certain audience members' blood boil, and yet those same moments will make other audiences roll their eyes. One way or the other, you will likely Google PFOA and other forever chemicals and wonder if they're in your water and blood. Whether or not you do much else beyond that might be a measure of how successful this film is.