Yes, the great cinematographer Ed Lachman has a wonderful way of making you feel every bitter cold early sunset with his black, grey and dark blue color schemes. Dark Waters feels like the straightforward cousin to that film as it explores corporate greed and cover-ups and the lives left in the balance. It was weird, experimental, and abstractly haunting. In 1995, Todd Haynes made the film, Safe, starring Julianne Moore as a woman with severe environmental allergies. Think Erin Brockovich without the humor and you'll get a good sense of the tone of this dreary, dark, nihilistic film.
It nearly kills him and deeply affects his marriage to his wife, a former attorney played by Anne Hathaway, and relationship with his son.
Risking his standing at his law firm, presided over by Tom Terp (an unpredictable and passionate performance by Tim Robbins), to launch an investigation which takes over 20 years to complete. One night at a fancy dinner, Bilott confronts a DuPont executive (a perfectly insidious Victor Garber) and gets such an obvious brush-off that he can't help but go down that rabbit hole. It doesn't hurt that his biggest client, DuPont, has a plant there which just may be poisoning the water supply. At first dismissing him as a crazy rube, Bilott decides to make the 120 mile drive to see for himself. You can feel Haynes in this scene more than anywhere else in the film, considering its haunting, dreamlike imagery.įlashing forward to the late 1990s, the story properly starts when a farmer named Wilbur Tennant (a magnificent Bill Camp) barges in on Cincinnati Corporate Attorney Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) to demand he return to his home town in West Virginia to investigate why his cattle have all started dying. Written by Mario Correa and Matthew Michael Carnahan, the story spans decades, promisingly opening with an eerie Jaws-like sequence in which some 1970s teens swim naked in a polluted West Virginia lake. I actually think the movie works really well, but I can't identify the filmmaker who brought us Velvet Goldmine, Carol or Far From Heaven here. That doesn't mean Dark Waters, the true story of a corporate attorney who sues his own client doesn't have merit. Well, finally when it comes to Todd Haynes, as idiosyncratic as they come, we now know what he brings to a procedural drama. I've often wondered if Wes Anderson were to drop his dioramas and deadpan style, could he make a good, straight up drama? What does a Christopher Nolan musical look like? Does Quentin Tarantino have a Tiffany Haddish comedy in him? Can auteurs put their stamp on made-for-hire movies? These questions keep me up at night. BARELY LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY - My Review of DARK WATERS (3 1/2 Stars)
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