Todd Haynes has made an homage to ’50s melodrama (Far From Heaven), a lesbian love story based on a Patricia Highsmith novel (Carol) and a boldly prismatic study of Bob Dylan (I’m Not There), among other movies. Regardless of subject, there’s always something a little unstable at the core of his films, something bordering on horror without actually crossing into that realm. Haynes is a poet of isolation and distance, an acute conveyor of loneliness that threatens to bleed into something more tragic.
This quality permeates Dark Waters, Haynes’ 2019 legal drama based on the true story of Rob Bilott, an environmental lawyer who made it his mission to hold DuPont accountable for poisoning the people of West Virginia with chemical waste in the local water supply. Played by Mark Ruffalo, Bilott enters the fray reluctantly when his grandmother connects him with an irate West Virginia farmer (the always-excellent Bill Camp) whose cows have been dying in strange, gruesome ways. The case then takes over his life, a process that Haynes depicts as more terrifying than inspiring. Once Rob sees the truth, he can’t unsee it. It haunts his waking hours. It leads to physical deterioration and literal collapse. His hands shake uncontrollably. This case of a lifetime is also a curse of sorts; Rob is like a Biblical prophet barely able to shoulder his burden.
Yes, Dark Waters, which came and went with little fanfare and deserves to be seen, also has elements of the inspirational lawyer story. Keep fighting! Don’t let ‘em get you down! Expose the truth! When Rob demands discovery materials from DuPont, the chemical giant responds with what looks like hundreds of boxes of documents. The unspoken message: Good luck going through all that. This dramatic device is used in other lawyer stories, including the 2021 miniseries Dopesick, another tale of a massive corporation (in that case Purdue Pharma) spending its legal opposition into the ground as it perpetuates a public health crisis. Rob, of course, rolls up his sleeves and gets to work. And that work continues for some 20 years, as Rob keeps pushing the boulder up the hill and DuPont wields its influence and digs into its bottomless treasure chest, shrugging off legal defeats with the knowledge that it can afford to push the contest into infinity.
This, the movie suggests, is the long game that corporations play. Keep lawyering, and keep spending. Rob has his allies, including his boss, Tom Terp, played by Tim Robbins. But those allies have their limits. Tom has a firm to run and, of course, money to make. Rob’s wife, Sarah (Anne Hathaway), also has limits. She’s got kids to raise, and a husband who grows increasingly quiet and stares off into the middle distance as his obsession deepens. Haynes likes to pin his heroes under a microscope, not to mock them or to torture them, but to emphasize their isolation – and by extension human isolation in general. In this world, taking on the responsibilities of a crusading lawyer can be very, very lonely. The assignment comes with no glory.
Ruffalo never gives a bad performance, but this is among his best. His Rob is doughy and a little hunched over and has a haircut one sincerely hopes he didn’t pay much to get. He sticks his lower lip out like a man of self-conscious uncertainty. He is Super Lawyer as Everyman, weighed down by the task he has accepted, moving forward incrementally, in small, uneven steps. The film does a fine job illustrating the slow passage of time as the case grows tentacles and becomes many cases. Rob and Sarah’s kids get older, as kids do. The people for whom Rob fights grow impatient and vindictive. Dark Waters deftly illustrates that the law can move very slowly.
Haynes is not the kind of filmmaker to make a straightforward legal thriller. He’s a student, a dissector, of film form; Dark Waters is as much about the genre it occupies as the story on which it is based (originally told in Nathaniel Rich’s New York Times Magazine article “The Lawyer who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare”). Other movies about lawyers and contaminated water, both good (Erin Brockovich) and not-so-good (A Civil Action), have familiar Hollywood storytelling beats and aesthetic choices. This isn’t that kind of movie. Haynes wants you to feel some of the existential torment that comes with fighting what looks like an unwinnable battle. In this David and Goliath tale, being David takes a heavy toll.