In the dark: Leader movie reviews

‘Dark Waters’ compellingly examines consequences of corporate malfeasance

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Director Todd Haynes’ “Dark Waters” is less of a narrative film than it is a political polemic, but it is nonetheless very engaging and persuasive, with only one real flaw which I’ll address later.

Mario Correa and Matthew Michael Carnahan took a real-life legal case — one which earned corporate attorney Robert Bilott the title of “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare” in Nathaniel Rich’s 2016 article for The New York Times Magazine — and wrote a screenplay that guided audiences through its litigation from 1998 through 2015, summing up a history of corporate misdeeds dating back to at least 1957.

With material this dry — a major revelation hinges on our protagonist piecing together the side-effects of a chemical with the acronyms PFOA and C8, comprised of chains of eight carbon atoms — it’s all too easy to get lost in the weeds, and there are scenes in which the characters’ dialogue is outright didactic.

What saves this film from feeling like a lecture is how strongly it ties those chemical acronyms and corporate memos to how the actions of one of the largest chemical companies in the world affected the health and lives of real people, from employees of DuPont, to residents of the small West Virginia town where DuPont sited its landfill, to consumers who unwittingly exposed themselves to those same hazardous chemicals by using DuPont’s Teflon products.

This means you, by the way, since the current consensus of the scientific community is that 99 percent of all Americans, including newborns, have at least some amount of PFOA in their blood.

A particularly harrowing example of the consequences of PFOA exposure is the tale of William “Bucky” Bailey, whose mother worked with C8 waste at a DuPont plant when she was pregnant.

“Dark Waters” not only tells us about the birth defects that Bailey was subsequently born with, but it also features the real-life Bailey, in a brief appearance as himself, to hammer home that the events depicted by this film are recent enough that they’re not even the past yet.

If what passes for a story arc in this film seems lifted from any number of other legal thrillers, it can be forgiven for the importance of the information that it’s passing on, as well as the compelling performances of Haynes’ cast, in bringing the stuff of unreturned phone calls and boxes of paperwork to life.

Marvel “Hulk” Mark Ruffalo does a Herculean amount of heavy lifting in a different sense, exercising his dramatic muscles in playing Bilott, and conveying the weight of his conscience-bound obligations to the people of his grandmother’s West Virginia town, which leads to a level of repressed anger not unlike that of Bruce Banner.

Ruffalo is ably assisted by a cast of proven talents that includes a surprisingly sympathetic Tim Robbins, an endearingly countryfied Bill Pullman, a satisfyingly sniveling Victor Garber and an unexpected Mare Winningham.

Which brings me to my lone significant criticism. Even well-done biopics such as “Ford v Ferrari” can’t resist falling back on an especially tiresome trope, and honesty compels me to credit my coworkers at The Leader, Lily Haight and Carmen Jaramillo, for pointing out to me how often we see the struggling protagonist fighting with his wife, over what his seemingly quixotic quest is doing to their marriage and family.

Anne Hathaway is a dynamite actress, and she works like hell with the material she’s afforded, in playing Bilott’s neglected and overburdened wife, but especially given that we’re told how she used to be a lawyer as well, I can’t help but think what a waste it is for “Dark Waters” not to show the perspective of a spouse who’s just as capable as her husband of understanding the legal ramifications of his case.

As with Martin Scorsese’s largely guy-centric films, this doesn’t necessarily make “Dark Waters” a bad movie, but it is something that I’d like to see more filmmakers recognize and fix in their future output, since they surely have the skills to do so.