Film Review: DARK WATERS

Ruffalo as Rob Billot, visiting a poisoned W. Virginia farm. 

A fictionalized account of a true story released and mostly overlooked in 2019, Dark Waters will pretty much kill your trust in anything and anyone not related to you by blood. Still, it's an absorbing and worthwhile movie despite, or maybe because of, its dire subject: the poisoning of a small family farm by the great and mighty DuPont Corporation, makers of many fine chemical-based products to make your life easier. Take, for example, that Teflon frying pan you use every day.*

Starring Mark Ruffalo and Tim Robbins as lawyers caught in the web of DuPont's lies, the story focuses on a West Virginia farmer whose cows are all mysteriously dying of horrible organ failures and dysfunctions, but not before they go crazy first. In desperation, the farmer (Bill Camp) reaches out to big-city lawyer Robert Billot (Ruffalo) for help. At first he is turned away, but soon enough Billot becomes obsessed with unraveling the truth, despite the fact that his own firm, in which he has just been named a partner, represents DuPont as a client. Naturally there are unintended consequences for his legal career when Billot publicly discloses that DuPont has been using the neighboring farmland as a toxic chemical dump.

A bleak visual experience, which one film critic called "spiritually draining," darkness is the overriding color onscreen. Still, the film grabs you and holds your attention for just over two hours. Serviceable supporting performances by Anne Hathaway, Mare Winningham, Bill Pullman and Victor Garber add to the A-list cast, but it's Ruffalo's film all the way. As usual, he loses himself in the role and does a superb job. (Still without an Oscar, he is surely one of Hollywood's most underrated actors.)

When the final credits roll you will likely do as I did and go straight to the kitchen and throw out all your Teflon pans. But it's too late, since we've been told that 99% of us already have ingested the poison. Anyway, watching the movie can't hurt you, and it might even help.

* One of the key ingredients in DuPont's Teflon was C8, a toxic, man-made chemical also known as PFOS or PFOA. It's what gave Teflon its non-stick properties. Since it was eventually proven to be a deadly toxin, it was replaced with another chemical compound called Gen-X, which is already showing up in waterways.