Dark Waters
- As a true story, it’s both appalling and inspiring. As a movie, it’s just alright.
Full Disclosure: I didn’t know much about this movie going in. I think I’d seen the trailer once and that was about it. However, I’m always up for an underdog story about a dedicated hero fighting against odds to uncover corruption or injustice.
Review
“Chemical companies are evil” is just something that we know instinctively. That they’re awful polluters, sure. I was surprised, though, that I didn’t know more of the details of this case, especially since much of it was still ongoing in the past decade. And while the first statement above may be almost a truism, I wasn’t really aware of the depths of how contemptible certain chemical companies could behave (in this case, Dupont), or the extent of their deliberate culpability. It’s hard to get much lower than continuing to poison pregnant mothers with chemicals when you know what the effects will be.
This movie is both informative and important, then, and that’s probably the first thing that should be said about it. Unfortunately, it’s also a movie, and while it does have its dramatic moments, there aren’t really enough of them to sustain it for its full running length of 126 minutes. In the opening credits it states that it’s based on an article from The New York Times Magazine, and for much of the film it really feels like it. It plays out like a list of steps that a lawyer needs to take in order to make a case against a stonewalling corporate defendant. While much of that is good to know, and even interesting, it tends to get a little repetitive on the screen.
Ruffalo’s Billot, sniffing around a farm, where he first gets a hint about how bad chemical companies can be.
The best moment in the film happens fairly early on. It takes place once Robert Bilott (the real-life lawyer played by Mark Ruffalo) begins to realize how much Dupont knew about the dangers of the chemicals in Teflon, and what they did to cover it up. The exposition is unrolled in intercutting scenes as he’s explaining the case to both his wife (played by Anne Hathaway), and his boss (played by Tim Robbins). It was very well done, and the pacing and execution of the explanation, combined with the tone set by the score in that scene, really laid out the gravity of the situation.
The problem is that this great expository scene takes place so early in the movie, that there really isn’t anywhere for the film to go from there in terms of dramatic tension. Sure, there are dribs and drabs of further explanation of Dupont’s actions, but the rest of the movie is focussed on whether or not Dupont will get away with what we already know. And that means a lot of lawyering, and waiting, much like in real life.
What we’re left with is a movie about the main character’s struggles to make his case. This is noble, inspiring, and laudable stuff. It’s also, for the most part, not very interesting. This includes the requisite scenes of tension with his family. It’s a waste of Anne Hathaway’s talents that she was mostly relegated to the wet blanket, nagging wife-role here. Or was she? There were a couple of moments when she seemed supportive, but because this didn’t happen in any sort of logical sequence following a moment of realization, it was hard to determine where she really stood on her husband’s work.
The same issue was true for Tim Robbins’ character as Bilott’s boss. He seemed to waver back and forth between being supportive or not throughout the movie. Again, wanting for understandable sequencing, his strongest pronouncement on the subject (and Robbins’ and one of the movie’s best moments) came in the middle of the movie when he lambastes his fellow legal partners for not recognizing the moral imperative of pursuing the case.
Spoilers Ahead
Anne Hathaway’s talents were frankly wasted in this movie, where she played a sometimes-nagging, sometimes-supportive wife.
At about the mid-point of the movie, Bilott starts manifesting physical problems related to the case. It starts with his hands mildly shaking in one scene, and eventually leads to a full-on collapse in his boss’ office. This, of course, catches our attention. Has he been poisoned somehow (something his wife even asks outright at one point)? Was he exposed to the very chemicals he’s investigating? Nope, turns out it was just stress from the case.
Absent any built-in dramatic tension, the movie relies on several red herrings like that to try to juice up the story. Another happens after he’s gone to Dupont’s office for a deposition. Afterwards, he finds himself alone in his car in an empty section of the parking garage, and as the music swells, he hesitates before starting his car, presumably because he’s worried about a car bomb. But his car starts normally, nothing happens, and there’s never any indication that his life was really in danger.
The problem with a legal drama like this, based on a true story, is that it doesn’t involve much in the way of cinematic courtroom drama. Most of the important turning points in this story happened in mediation or settlements. However, I still think they could have found ways to highlight the big moments in a more striking manner, even if it meant making different decisions on what parts of the story to dramatize. For example, the big final “gotcha”, when Dupont finally agrees to a blanket settlement of hundreds of millions of dollars, doesn’t even take place on screen. It’s tucked away in a title card in the epilogue. The movie ends instead with Bilott back in a courtroom to file a standard brief. Even the judge’s reaction to seeing Bilott could be interpreted as an indication of how little dramatic arc there is in the film when he asks Bilott, “you’re still here?”
Ruffalo standing up in court where he’s probably filing a motion, or maybe even a brief. How’s that for dramatic tension!
5 Quick Hits
The movie opens with a short scene of teenagers going skinny-dipping in a pond near the Dupont plant in 1975. I kept expecting those people to show up again, (or at least for them to be referenced at some point in the movie) but they never did. It was an odd choice for an opening scene, set more than a decade before the events of the movie, when it apparently had no bearing on future events.
Bilott’s decision to jump on the case seemed to come out of nowhere. He decided to drive more than 3 hours to Parkersburg just because someone who dropped by his office mentioned that he knew his grandmother (and she only appears once in the film)? The guy who ends up becoming his client dropped off a bunch of video tapes when they first meet. Bilott could have at least looked at the videotapes first. That might have been more believable way to pique his interest.
I also didn’t like how dark the filter was that they used in most of the filming. We get it, you’re trying to set the tone for the movie, but after a while it was just annoying, like trying to watch through a bedsheet.
Tim Robbins was undoubtedly my favourite acting performance in this movie. He completely inhabited his role as a successful, but morally-centred lawyer.
For a movie lacking in inherent dramatic tension, the composer of the score, Marcelo Zarvos, really did a great job of mood-setting. It wasn’t a particularly memorable score, but it was an excellent complement to the action on the screen.
