Todd Haynes has done it again. Nobody would have thought he'd jump into a legal thriller, much less one about the DuPont poisoning scandal in West Virginia. But here it is, one of the best pictures of the year.
Mark Ruffalo stars as Robert Bilott, an Ohio attorney who stumbles upon a troubling problem in the foothills of Parkersburg, West Virginia: cows are becoming mad, getting sick, and dying en masse. The farmer whose cows have been plagued is convinced that DuPont is dumping chemical waste nearby, and even though Bilott's firm represents the chemical manufacturer, he cannot shake the feeling that something is horribly wrong. This protagonist is a more or less typical Haynes character study in that he is an outsider looking for belonging and purpose and ends up in way over his head. His timid, almost turtle-like demeanor belies a fiercely obsessive intellectual bent, and Bilott quickly becomes, as the headline said, "The Lawyer Who Became DuPont's Worst Nightmare."
Ruffalo here proves his mettle in the kind of "everyman" role that James Stewart thrived on, an awkward but unshakably decent man determined to do the right thing. And in a case like this, the right thing will prove to dominate the rest of his life, much to the chagrin of his wife, the woefully underused but always reliably excellent Anne Hathaway (who really should have played opposite Cate Blanchett in Carol, but that's another rant). It's one thing, after all, to prove wrongdoing. It's quite another to prove intent and lasting damages for such a long period of time and, as we learn, over so much global ground.
Because, thrilling as the film often is, its earnest delivery of corporate-sponsored destruction of lives and property is ongoing, making questions of our own health and complicity requisite topics of conversation for post-screening reflection. While the film pulls at our patience -- the story spans decades, friends -- writers Mario Correa (I don't know of him) and Matthew Michael Carnahan (Lions for Lambs, State of Play) do their best to keep the important parts in, balancing crucial plot development with key character turning points, making the film remarkably intimate and vast at once. It can all get pretty thick and heavy, and Haynes wades into surprisingly dark water here (forgive me). Thankfully, the righteous anger of Dark Waters comes with a strange optimism: even this little guy could take on the big business. The film allows Bilott the platform to help laypeople like me understand how this disaster could have happened, how and why it's been covered up for so long, and of course how it's possible -- indeed, our duty -- to resist.
I was left with cold sweat and a warm feeling in my heart despite the agony of viewing, but I was also left with the burning question of why on earth Haynes decided this story would fit into his body of work. But as I reflected on his early film Safe, in which Julianne Moore develops a mysterious illness to everything around her, I recognized Haynes's sense of paranoia and invisible stressors that loom over the proceedings. And as I thought of Far From Heaven, I wondered if Haynes was drawing a parallel from that picture's depiction of racism/sexism/homophobia and in this film finally highlighting economic status and class as similarly dangerous social constructs that alienate victims and disenfranchise individuals most at risk. And, of course, Haynes controls his art with a sure hand and remarkably insightful eye, making even the slightest of focus shifts sing with purpose and injecting electrified tension into each emotional beat between actors. This movie is a masterclass in directorial artistic integrity, and it's also a damn important story to see on screen.
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