Todd Haynes (2019)
After being admitted to the bar in 1990, Robert Bilott worked at a Cincinnati law firm, specialising in the defence of chemical companies in litigation cases. Some eight years later, he had just been made a partner in the firm when he took on the case of Wilbur Tennant, a West Virginia farmer whose cattle were mysteriously dying. Tennant’s farm was downstream from a landfill where the chemical giant DuPont had been dumping unregulated and hazardous chemicals. This was the start of Bilott’s remarkable switch into environmental law and biting the hand that had once fed him. In the years that followed, he devoted himself to uncovering a major public health scandal: an independent scientific panel eventually confirmed a probable link between DuPont’s chemical contamination of drinking water in West Virginia and Ohio, and the high incidence in local communities of kidney and testicular cancer, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, pre-eclampsia, and ulcerative colitis. Come 2016, Bilott was the subject of a New York Times Magazine profile by Nathaniel Rich, entitled ‘The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare’. Todd Haynes’s Dark Waters, with a screenplay based on Rich’s profile, is a dramatisation of these events.
You can often watch a true-story drama – especially one involving people who in reality are still highly active, as Rob Bilott is – and end up thinking: this should have been a documentary. It’s not easy for film-makers working with such material to reconcile the twin imperatives of conveying complex information and ensuring emotional involvement with characters in their story – and the latter tends to be given priority. Dark Waters is something of an exception. First, because by the time it went into production, a feature-length documentary on the subject, Stephanie Soechtig’s The Devil We Know (2018), had already been released. Second, because Haynes’s narrative seems to defeat the purpose of dramatising the material – it’s subdued, workaday and uninvolving.
Things soon start going wrong. At the beginning of Dark Waters there’s a definite suggestion that it’s been a hard road to a partnership for Rob (Mark Ruffalo) – that he’s finally made it professionally – but Haynes is quickly impatient to cut to the chase of his David hero taking on the Goliath corporate vested interests on whose behalf he previously worked. When his grandmother (Marcia Dangerfield) tells him about Wilbur Tennant, her friend and neighbour, and seeks Rob’s help, it’s nowhere near enough of a dilemma for him. It doesn’t help either that his first meeting with Tennant (Bill Camp) is clunky – even assuming the exchange really happened, you don’t believe this version of it. The director’s haste denies his lead actor scope for rooting his character, a problem compounded by the sketchy writing of Rob’s home life, especially his marriage to Sarah (Anne Hathaway).
Haynes and Matthew Michael Carnahan, who did the screenplay, may well have wanted to handle with care because the Bilotts are still married but their discretion leaves Anne Hathaway hardly anything to work with. We get the message that Sarah Barlage Bilott was herself a legal high-flyer, who sacrificed her own career for the sake of her husband’s and to bring up their three sons (played by various boys at different ages). It’s impossible, though, to accept that this smart, self-assured woman would have had so little to say about her husband’s gruelling campaign for justice – and it’s hardly surprising that, on the rare occasions the script does supply a domestic showdown between them, Hathaway goes at it too eagerly. Sarah’s reticence seems, more than anything, a convenience for Haynes, who’s keen to minimise interruptions to the detective work and litigation driving the plot.
Since Mark Ruffalo looks weary and unwell from the word go, the effects of Rob’s obsession don’t register as clearly as they probably should – at least until he collapses and is carted off to hospital. Anne Hathaway has her strongest moment when Sarah, talking in a hospital corridor with Rob’s boss (Tim Robbins), loses patience with his concerned platitudes and tartly tells him, ‘Don’t talk to me like I’m “the wife”’. (Of course, this also serves to underline the implausibility of her suffering in silence most of the time.) In the main supporting roles, Tim Robbins gives a well-judged performance but the scary eyebrows that Bill Camp wears make him look OTT even before his strenuous playing is underway. Mare Winningham is good as a local woman supportive of what Rob is trying to do but a potentially interesting larger theme – of the community’s persisting feelings of loyalty to DuPont because of economic benefits they’ve supposedly brought to the region – is barely developed beyond a couple of brief, obvious illustrations.
You wouldn’t guess that this film was made by the author of Far from Heaven (2002), I’m Not There (2007) and Carol (2015), except for the occasional, beautifully impressive landscape images of Edward Lachman, Todd Haynes’s regular cinematographer. Dark Waters isn’t just unexpected territory for Hayes; it turns out to be alien territory, too. He has, more often than not, written his own screenplays and there’s no doubt that he’s saddled here with a weak script credited to another hand. Haynes may also have felt, given the seriousness of the real-life events he’s describing, that he should let these do the talking and not impose himself on the narrative. Whatever the factors, the resulting film falls between two stools. With comparable material, Steven Soderbergh achieved in Erin Brockovich (2000) a broadly satisfying balance between heroising the title character and telling a socio-legally important true story. Dark Waters lacks the melodramatic energy to work as a coarse but emotionally effective crowd-pleaser. It’s too shallow to be convincing drama.
4 December 2021
