Dark Waters: Todd Haynes Drama Strips the Teflon Off Dupont's Record of Toxic Sludge

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

There’s an unmistakable aura of déjà vu around Dark Waters, a docudrama/thriller about a powerful corporation hiding lethal secrets with political and legal chicanery. In the tradition of erstwhile award candidates, Silkwood,, Erin Brockovich, The Insider and Spotlight, it’s a David and Goliath story designed to encourage righteous anger. 

The film stars Mark Ruffalo as a corporate lawyer who spent almost two decades prosecuting DuPont for dumping toxic sludge and poisoning customers through its famous non-stick cooking product, Teflon. 

There’s one aspect of Dark Waters that’s genuinely surprising.  The movie is directed by Todd Haynes, the creator of such stylistically-distinctive films as Safe, Far from Heaven, Velvet Goldmine, Carol  and the television series, Mildred Pierce. But Dark Waters is almost a no-style film, focused on middle-America drabness with just a touch of horror, as if Haynes were reluctant to let any suggestion of an excess of style get in the way of the blunt message.

Ruffalo, who also produced the film, plays the modest, rumpled Rob Bilott, a corporate defense lawyer who was - to cite the title of the Nathaniel Rich’s New York Magazine article that inspired the film - “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare.”

Shortly after Rob has been made partner at his Cincinnati law firm, an eccentric farmer with fierce eyebrows and a mouth-full-of-oatmeal accent comes into the law firm lobby demanding an appointment. The man is named Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp) and he knows Rob’s West Virginia grandmother, who lives a couple of hundred miles west in Parkersburg, West Virginia.

Wilbur, who sounds genuinely delusional, says his cattle are dying and DuPont, the biggest employer in the area, is behind it. He demands that Rob represent him. Despite reservations from the law firm’s partner Tom Terp (Tim Robbins), Bilott is given the go-ahead to investigate.

As written by Mario Correa and Matthew Michael Carnahan, the tale spans 17 years, beginning in 1998, when Wilbur first shows Bilott a gravesite for almost 200 cows. After an initial investigation, Bilott discovers that barrels of a 50-year-old synthetic chemical known as PFOA have been buried in barrels in the area. That’s the beginning of a legal fight of more than two decades in the process of learning about a synthetic chemical that’s present in almost every living thing on the planet. In short, it’s a hell of a big story.

Haynes’ determinedly downbeat style – the middle-American slightly puffy bodies, the quaint hair-dos and drably functional interiors -- is mostly naturalistic, though doused with a flashes of paranoid horror: Those pale green toxic fields, shot by cinematographer Edward Lachman; the slow-motion scenes of bicycling West Virginian children smiling through chemically-damaged black teeth; a German shepherd dog spinning convulsively. And then there’s Wilbur’s grisly evidence collection  -- a fridge full of cancerous cow tumors and twisted hooves.

At the same time, screenwriters undermine the suspense by cramming the movie with data. At the half-way point in the film, there’s a scene where Rob’s pregnant wife, Sarah (Anne Hathaway), comes home to find a wild-eyed Rob frantically digging up the carpet.

When she asks what’s going on, he begins an expository monologue about the history of this dangerous chemical: DuPont, who knew that PFOA showed indications of causing cancer in rats, made a billion dollars a year off Teflon, and because the product pre-dated Environmental Protection Association laws, was free of government oversight. The monologue continues, as he talks to two other people in different places. While it’s an efficient way of showing Rob’s increasing monomania, it also feels like a TED talk has been dump-trucked into the middle of the script.  

This is a movie about heroic patience, sometimes for the viewer as well as Ruffalo’s character. As the court cases drag on for years, Bilott himself suffers from health problems (presumably from stress, not uncommon with lawyers, and not bad chemicals.) Domestic scenes suggest the prolonged case causes cracks in Rob marriage. 

With each time-jump of a year or two, there appears to be a new baby boy in the house and Hathaway appears in a new hair-do, but Hathaway’s character typically come across as unsupportive and short-sighted. Hathaway eventually gets a sympathetic moment in a hospital scene where she confronts his boss (Robbins) and explains why family and loyalty are driving motivation in Rob’s life. 

While Dark Waters is something of a let-down for a Haynes film, it’s otherwise sturdy enough. One can admire the commitment of Ruffalo, who plays the role of the modest, decent, semi-accidental hero without vanity or trite psychology. And apart from those horror-movie tropes, this is a film that feels true to the sociology of the Appalachian-Rust Belt regions, what we now think of as Trumpland, and the ingrained cultural reluctance to challenge the status quo. I thought of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land, which chronicles how some of the most pollution-afflicted people in the United States are also the biggest supporters of unregulated industry.

As part of the film’s passion-project pedigree, small roles are filled with big actors – Mare Winningham, seen briefly, as a suburban housewife who joins a class action suit, Bill Pullman as a flashy Parkersburg lawyer who joins Billot’s team and Victor Garber as the cagey DuPont executive – who all to add gravitas to the movie. They serve, in a sense, as character witnesses to the importance of Ruffalo’s cause.

Dark Waters. Directed by Todd Haynes. Written by Mario Correa and Matthew Michael Carnahan. Starring Mark Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway, Bill Camp, Tim Robbins, Victor Garber, Mare Winningham and Bill Pullman. Opens November 29 at Toronto’s Cineplex Varsity Cinemas.