☆☆☆☆
It's been 25 years since Todd Haynes made the off-kilter Safe, in which a suburban housewife believes she is being poisoned by the environment and goes mad. And now, a quarter of a century later, Haynes is back with a response to his earlier film: She was right. And he's got proof.
Dark Waters is based on the story of Rob Bilott (Mark Ruffalo), a high-priced corporate attorney in Cincinnati who switches sides when a West Virginia farmer (Bob Camp) comes to see him about his cows. They've been dying; actually, everything has been dying, and he thinks mega-conglomerate DuPont is behind it all.
Dark Waters wades tantalizingly into the stream of '70s conspiracy thrillers as Bilott convinces his boss (Tim Robbins) and his wife (Anne Hathaway, underwritten but strong) that the case is worth taking. It's tense, convincing and absorbing. Then, for a while, the film seems to meander. So does the case, as 69,000 are tested for contamination. That takes years. And years. And years. As everyone loses faith, Bilott does, too.
If it were only about the environmental misdeeds of a company, it would be Erin Brockovich, but Haynes is playing at something else in this disturbing, stirring movie. He wants us to see what happens to a man who clings to Martin Luther King's conviction that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." There's truth in that, but the waiting -- ah, the waiting; that'll get you every time. Almost.
Viewed Nov. 29, 2019 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks
1930
Dark Waters is based on the story of Rob Bilott (Mark Ruffalo), a high-priced corporate attorney in Cincinnati who switches sides when a West Virginia farmer (Bob Camp) comes to see him about his cows. They've been dying; actually, everything has been dying, and he thinks mega-conglomerate DuPont is behind it all.
Dark Waters wades tantalizingly into the stream of '70s conspiracy thrillers as Bilott convinces his boss (Tim Robbins) and his wife (Anne Hathaway, underwritten but strong) that the case is worth taking. It's tense, convincing and absorbing. Then, for a while, the film seems to meander. So does the case, as 69,000 are tested for contamination. That takes years. And years. And years. As everyone loses faith, Bilott does, too.
If it were only about the environmental misdeeds of a company, it would be Erin Brockovich, but Haynes is playing at something else in this disturbing, stirring movie. He wants us to see what happens to a man who clings to Martin Luther King's conviction that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." There's truth in that, but the waiting -- ah, the waiting; that'll get you every time. Almost.
Viewed Nov. 29, 2019 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks
1930
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