Chris Vognar

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.

Frank Galvin is a mess. A drunken has-been of a lawyer, disillusioned by past failures and the corruption that plagues the justice system, he whiles away his time drinking whiskey and playing pinball at his favorite Boston bar. When Frank takes a case all but guaranteed to yield a fat settlement — a Catholic hospital gave a pregnant woman the wrong anesthetic, rendering her a vegetative state, and the diocese wants the whole thing to go away — he sees dollar signs spinning before his eyes. But then something happens.

When Roberto Clemente made it to “the show” in 1955, sportswriters and baseball card manufacturers took to calling him “Bob” — not out of informality but because they felt the need to deracinate his name and his appeal. Baseball was still decades away from the days when every big league roster became stocked with Latin players, and the Puerto Rican phenom posed some sort of threat to the established (white American) order. Those same writers would quote Clemente by denoting his thick accent — for example, “heet” instead of “hit.” If Clemente sometimes seemed to have a chip on his shoulder, it’s not difficult to see why. The man bluntly and accurately nicknamed The Great One is now the subject of an affectionate and thorough documentary, simply called Clemente, that premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in March. (Photo credit: Les Banos)