Dark Waters

By: Maggie Stankiewicz

Dark Waters is a film that has a lot to say and it does so quite eloquently. Guided by Nathaniel Rich’s New York Times article about one lawyer’s feverish antipathy for a chemical conglomerate’s chokehold on a West Virginian population, director Todd Haynes and screenwriters Matthew Michael Carnahan and Mario Correa strung together a convoluted chain of events that would change hundreds of thousands of lives. Dark Waters was marketed as a legal thriller. And while the term thriller is a bit of a misnomer, it is difficult to not get deeply invested in the story of Robert Billott and his crusade against DuPont. Engaging, enraging, inspiring and at times hard to watch, Dark Waters will stick with viewers long after the credits roll.

Robert Billot (Mark Ruffalo) is a partner at Cincinnati law firm Taft, Stettinius & Hollister that is best known for representing major corporations such as DuPont, a massive chemical manufacturer responsible for the mass production of infamous substances such as Teflon. In a serendipitous string of events, Robert is contacted by a West Virginia farmer named Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp) who claims to have an overwhelming amount of evidence that suggests DuPont is responsible for killing his cows, injuring his dogs and the overall degradation of his farm. Billott and his peers are hesitant to take on a pro-bono case that is also the antithesis of their client portfolio, but after taking a look at the state of the farmer’s land and community his morality pulls him down a road that takes him decades to successfully navigate.

Dark Waters is not afraid to get into the minutiae of corporate and civil law and forces audiences to follow Billott through the years as he initiates discovery within DuPont, an action that catalyzes a pissing match between Billott and Phil Donnelly (Victor Garber), a DuPont executive with a once strong relationship with Taft, Stettinius & Hollister. Robert Billott sacrifices his career, his marriage, his reputation and his livelihood over the span of years as he struggles to find a connection between Wilbur Tennant’s dying cattle, growing cancer and the petri dish of medical conditions (from hypertension to prostate cancer) afflicting the population living around DuPont dumping grounds. It should be boring to watch a man comb through folders and files scene after scene, but the film is so effective at harboring hatred towards DuPont and their disregard for human and animal life that watching Robert alphabetize paperwork is…well, thrilling.

The film paints a bleak and quite depressing picture of a world overridden with environmental crimes such as the ones committed by DuPont. There are scenes in which I had to close my eyes, like when Wilbur needs to shoot his cow after she comes down with the DuPont sickness. There is nothing pretty about this movie, despite being full of beautiful people, and that’s how it should be. Dark Waters dares to divert the glamour to paint a picture of a town being poisoned by a company and refusing to believe it. The people needed DuPont, despite the fact that the organization was slowly killing them. This message is always present and is always clear. Wilbur Tennant and Robert Billott always had the odds stacked against them. Even with the support of his boss Tom Terp (Tim Robbins), Billott has to fight devoted townsfolk, an organization with pockets reaching down to earth’s core and a judicial system that loves to take its time.

It’s uncomfortable to watch Dark Waters because it does the best it can to tell the truth in a vehicle that’s still committed to commercial release. It succeeds. It builds admiration and love for Wilbur Tennant and Robert Billott, generates sympathy for Robert’s often forgotten wife Sarah (Anne Hathaway) and promotes seething hatred for the lies we know we’re spoon fed by capitalism…and then it does something incredible. At the moment audiences believe that Robert, Wilbur and every other “little guy” wronged by the schoolyard bully are just too small to overcome – it pulls the rug out from under them. In the end, audiences get to watch DuPont get their just desserts. In this film the waters are surely dark, but they don’t always have to be – not when there’s men like Wilbur Tennant and Robert Billott around to shine a light, to set a precedent and to keep going even when the path is unclear.