Lawyers, Guns and Money: An occasional series on movies, TV and other stories about lawyers and the law — Dark Waters (2019, Dir. Todd Haynes)

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…