Dark Waters (2020) - Movie Review

Hope you’re all ready to be horrified, sad, and fucking furious today, because we’ve got a whopper of a real-life dramatisation to talk about right here. Following in the footsteps of his righteous turn in the scathing exposé Spotlight, star and producer Mark Ruffalo is once again playing a man taking the fight to a large-scale conspiracy, one that starts out in a little pocket of rural Americana but then reveals its tendrils all over the world. However, rather than systemic cover-up of sexual abuse, this film deals in something that might outweigh even that in terms of genuinely hideous behaviour: A chemical manufacturer who wilfully contaminated a vast majority of American citizens, and by extension a hefty amount of the global population.

The spectrum of moods that radiate from this production are quite staggering to behold, to the point where it opens less like a legal thriller and more like an environmental horror film in just how widespread its scope can get. Starting with Ruffalo’s Robert Bilott being approached by farmer Wilbur (Bill Camp in prime soul-crushing form), the gradual build-up of tension and dread and just plain disgust at the deeper implications of all this makes for particularly uncomfortable viewing, but in the best way possible.

Without bogging itself down too much in chemistry jargon, Mario Correa and Matthew Michael Carnahan’s scripting manages to explain what the chemical is, what it does to living things (shown with a very grisly look at cow anatomy) and just how far it spread through the production of Teflon-coated cookware and the like. It’s the kind of stomach-churning revelation that, if you’re going into this not knowing the story beforehand (which, full admission, includes myself), can make one feel particularly queasy, especially when they get into the hard numbers of just how many people, world-wide, have this chemical in their bodies. Like, upper-90s across the board.

But it merely shining a spotlight on this level of human endangerment and negligence isn’t even where the film hits its biggest points. That comes in how it shows the effect that all of this has on the people holding that spotlight; the people who want this shit to be known and stopped. It is an insanely depressing notion that, whenever whistle-blowers of any stripe come forward about a larger group’s misdeeds, they get targeted as being the problem. Just because they dared to bring it up, and in regards to DuPont, the chemical-spewing shitgibbons in question, their employment record and thinly-coated rapport with ‘the people’ allowed them the benefit of the doubt at first. It’s quite confronting how common that same thought pattern is when it comes to just about any social activism, especially against organisations with a reach this big.

And in the midst of the film’s frequent musings on the psychological toll of taking on this case, being bombarded with red tape and paperwork all the while, the way that religious faith plays into the narrative in exceptionally vibrant fashion, and how it manages to portray a lot of fiery emotions without utterly exploding on-screen (Ruffalo’s on-screen restraint and stress-addled reactions are stunning to watch unfold), the big message of this whole thing? Populism. And I don’t mean what the elite themselves like to proffer in exchange for furthering the divide; I mean honest-to-Dudeness common man vs. the higher-ups. In no uncertain terms, the film is aware of the uphill struggle that is Bilott’s war against DuPont, but is also grimly aware that, at the end of the day, no company is going to look out for them. We only have ourselves, and each other, to protect us.

It’s the kind of unifying, enlightening display of hope in the face of both literally and figuratively dark waters that really, really made me feel something. For a story with such a fundamentally terrifying premise, and one based on actual events at that, it ultimately wraps up on a note not of definitive victory, but of reassurance that while the fight is far from over, those fighting for us are also far from stopping. 2020 has taken a serious toll on a lot of us, and I have definitely been feeling the creeping despair of life under COVID-19, so seeing a film like this that outright refuses to let the darkness take over and fight the righteous cause… even with everything I’ve written down here, I still don’t think I have the words to express how much I needed this film.