Four stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, disturbing images and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.13.19
Mark Ruffalo has become this generation’s Henry Fonda. Or Jimmy Stewart.
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| When corporate attorney Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo, right) reluctantly visits the cattle ranch that has been in Wilbur Tennant's (Bill Camp) family for generations, they're startled by the sudden apperance of a heifer that appears to be viciously rabid. |
Ruffalo’s performances radiate the same intelligence and integrity. The same resolute dedication to a cause. The same anguish at the realization that greed and cowardice too frequently trump benevolence and compassion. The same disbelief over the ease with which people in power feel no remorse over lying, cheating and ill-treating those less equipped to fight back.
The primary difference is that Fonda and Stewart mostly played fictional characters in their iconic films, such as The Grapes of Wrath and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Ruffalo takes it a step further, tackling actual individuals in an expanding roster of fact-based sagas that qualify as searing advocacy cinema.
He earned his third Academy Award nomination for 2015’s Spotlight, while portraying Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe reporter Mike Rezendes, who led the investigative charge that exposed the local Catholic Archdiocese’s cover-up of child molestation cases. The film deservedly won that year’s Best Picture Oscar, and the viewing experience is jaw-dropping, as Rezendes and his fellow reporters uncover proof of the church’s ever-more-heinous behavior.
Dark Waters is even harder to watch.
Much harder.
This new film, also lifted from headlines, depicts defense attorney Robert Bilott’s heroic determination — over the course of two decades — to force DuPont to reveal that it had knowingly poisoned people for even longer. And not only had concealed such monstrous behavior, but defiantly maintained that it had done nothing “legally wrong,” and therefore could not be “blamed” for anything.
That last little detail comes well into a saga that already has become grim viewing. Director Todd Haynes’ approach is methodical and relentless, carefully fueled by the strong character dynamics that he delivered in Far from Heaven, Carol and other previous films.
The information dump is considerable but not insurmountable. In effect, we gradually learn the degrees of DuPont’s perfidy along with Bilott, while he becomes a reluctant investigator in the mold of Rezendes and — reaching further back — Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, in All the President’s Men.
Or, more closely linked, Erin Brockovich, in the 2000 drama named for that similarly righteous crusader. That case also started with water.
