Review: Dark Waters

Image courtesy of Focus Features.

"Dark Waters" is a David vs. Goliath tale of a corporate lawyer who turns against his own industry when he learns that a massive corporation - in this case, chemical company DuPont - was covering up egregious actions that have been harming the community in which he was raised. The film follows the formula set up by previous films that cover such stories, including "The Insider," "Erin Brockovich" and "Silkwood."

As such, it's the most unusual movie of director Todd Haynes' character. The filmmaker, who's among my favorite American directors of this century, typically makes movies about women that are set in the 1940s or 1950s - for example, the brilliant "Far from Heaven" and "Carol" or the HBO miniseries "Mildred Pierce" - or music films, such as "Velvet Goldmine" and the remarkable Bob Dylan phantasmagoria "I'm Not There."

In other words, "Dark Waters" feels like a standard, somewhat by-the-book, Hollywood drama about the little guy standing up to the corrupt corporation. That being said, it's a good example of that genre, mostly aided by a solid lead performance by Mark Ruffalo as Robert Bilott, a Cincinnati lawyer who defended chemical companies from lawsuits, but who is wooed to the other side in the late 1990s by a farmer who lost 190 cattle due to environmental pollution in Parkersburg, West Virginia, where Bilott grew up.

"Dark Waters" goes to show how draining - both financially and spiritually - a fight against a corporate giant can be. When the evidence comes to light that DuPont had been dumping C8 - also known as perfluorooctanoic acid - in Parkersburg's waterways during its production of teflon products, DuPont decides to drag out the lawsuits against the corporation in court in the hope of bankrupting its complainants, rather than halting production of its dangerous product or cleaning up its own mess.

Bilott is the type of character you'd expect in such a drama - an unassuming Brockovich-type of character who has a hang-dog appearance, but is ready to go for the jugular after he realizes how much harm the company he's fighting has caused to the people of his hometown. The film's second half also focuses on the physical and emotional toll the fight takes on Bilott and occasionally veers into paranoid thriller territory - as one complainant almost becomes the victim of arson, and Bilott becomes frightened to start his own car.

"Dark Waters" doesn't have the lush colors typically associated with a Haynes film - indeed, it has a somewhat drab appearance, but I don't mean that as an insult as this is clearly the aesthetic for which the film aims. The picture is also timely. While the battle over whether corporations are people - as some have argued - has been a years-long debate, there's no question that the release of "Dark Waters" comes at a time when regulations are dropping like flies for companies that have no interest in taking the public's safety into account.

Haynes' film is an angry one - and rightly so. The history of Hollywood movies has seen a steady stream of movies about lawyers or the everyman taking on a corporate entity or the corrupt powers that be - from "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" to "The Verdict" - but the current moment is a time at which such a concept feels more urgent. "Dark Waters" might not be the best example of its subgenre, but it's a well made, thoughtful and often riveting legal thriller. And when you consider one of Haynes' early successes - the great "Safe," which was about a woman suffering from psychosomatic stress as the result of her environment - it's not so difficult to see why he might want to make this movie.