Review: Dark Waters

Based on a true story outlined in a New York Times article, Mark Ruffalo plays a lawyer from a conservative firm that generally defends big corporations. It’s a comfortable life he has with wife Anne Hathaway and their kids. However, a farmer from Ruffalo’s home state of West Virginia (Bill Camp) brings news that one of the big corporations Ruffalo’s firm tends to be chummy with – DuPont Chemicals – has been dumping chemicals where they shouldn’t and it’s killing the livestock. Ruffalo’s law firm – chiefly the symbolically black-hatted Victor Garber want Ruffalo to shut the fuck up and leave it alone. Hell, even his wife isn’t impressed that her husband has suddenly turned into a do-gooder. However, Ruffalo has a conscience and it’s urging him to take on the fight. Tim Robbins plays Ruffalo’s boss, who may have half a conscience buried somewhere within him, Bill Pullman plays a crusading lawyer helping Ruffalo, Mare Winningham plays one of the affected West Virginians.

 

Haven’t we done this a billion times already? Being based on a true story isn’t reason enough on its own for a film to be made. This 2020 legal drama from director Todd Haynes (“Far From Heaven”, “Carol”) is a repeat of the same ‘good-hearted lawyer takes on big bad company poisoning the water’ story you’ve already seen in “The Rainmaker”, “Erin Brockovich”, “A Civil Action” and probably several others too, and only the first of those films is worthwhile in my view. The only new wrinkle this one gives us is that the lawyer taking on the big bad company here is a guy who normally gets paid to defend those big bad companies. If that alone is fascinating and worthwhile to you, perhaps you’ll actually enjoy what Haynes and screenwriters Matthew Michael Carnahan (“Deepwater Horizon”, “Lions for Lambs”) and Mario Correa (whose prior experience is mostly in documentaries) provide here. It wasn’t close to enough for me, and some decent hammy work by a nearly unrecognisable Bill Camp (getting a good, if unsubtle showing) didn’t make up enough of a difference for me either.

 

Ruffalo is well-cast in the lead, and Anne Hathaway very narrowly avoids total ‘bitchy, unreasonable wife’ caricature, but Victor Garber has never been worse, Bill Pullman is similarly bad, and Tim Robbins is coasting rather shamefully in a role well beneath him. The material is real white hats vs. black hats simplicity that doesn’t give the actors a whole lot of room to move. Also, true story or not, I didn’t buy Ruffalo’s character’s naivete, something a documentary would probably make irrelevant, but as a motion picture it’s a problem. I’s the film’s problem, not the actor’s.

 

This is embarrassing. Director Haynes and his screenwriters (and presumably producer-star Mark Ruffalo) want us to be shocked, surprised, outraged and so on about all of this toxic water business. Sorry, but I’ve watched a couple of movies in my lifetime, and at least one of them (“The Rainmaker”) was an awful lot better than this tired, clichéd affair. It’s boring, though Bill Camp is amusingly hammy in support.

 

Rating: C-