Dark Waters. (15.)
Directed by Todd Haynes.
Starring Mark Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway, Tim Robbins, Bill Camp, Bill Pullman, Victor Garber. 127 mins
The shocking, but somehow unsurprising, story of how DuPont chemicals poisoned the population of an American town as they developed Teflon is one that you will want to hear, but Dark Waters is maybe not a film that you'll need to see.
Overground underground filmmaker Haynes has previously veered between radical pieces (I'm Not There, Velvet Goldmine) and homages to 50s melodrama (Carol, Far From Heaven.) Here though he pulls an Erin Brockovich, trying to do a mainstream, Oscar pleading hero-lawyer-takes-on-corporate-injustice tale. Instead of Julia Roberts, we have Ruffalo as a big shot lawyer who is struck down with a bad case of conscience when a farmer (Camp) from back home in West Virginia, turns up in his office with videotape and enlarged bovine organs claiming poison from a DuPont dumping ground have turned his cows manky.
The topic is explosive - a cancer causing forever chemical, PFOA-C8, used to make Teflon and which never breaks down and 99% of all living things on the planet have it in their bloodstream - but the film shortchanges it. The issues are explained clearly but it can't fill out the human drama, show how the events affect the characters. Only Ruffalo and Camp's characters are properly rounded. Hathaway's character insists that she is not just The Wife and has Something To Contribute, but in the film she is just The Wife, and you wonder how she ended up in such an insignificant role.
Still, beyond the shortcomings the film subverts the genre in that it doesn't make the victory into a victory. Haynes likes a Douglas Sirk ending: one that seems happy but probably isn't and here he gives us a victory that feels like a defeat.
Directed by Todd Haynes.
Starring Mark Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway, Tim Robbins, Bill Camp, Bill Pullman, Victor Garber. 127 mins
The shocking, but somehow unsurprising, story of how DuPont chemicals poisoned the population of an American town as they developed Teflon is one that you will want to hear, but Dark Waters is maybe not a film that you'll need to see.
Overground underground filmmaker Haynes has previously veered between radical pieces (I'm Not There, Velvet Goldmine) and homages to 50s melodrama (Carol, Far From Heaven.) Here though he pulls an Erin Brockovich, trying to do a mainstream, Oscar pleading hero-lawyer-takes-on-corporate-injustice tale. Instead of Julia Roberts, we have Ruffalo as a big shot lawyer who is struck down with a bad case of conscience when a farmer (Camp) from back home in West Virginia, turns up in his office with videotape and enlarged bovine organs claiming poison from a DuPont dumping ground have turned his cows manky.
The topic is explosive - a cancer causing forever chemical, PFOA-C8, used to make Teflon and which never breaks down and 99% of all living things on the planet have it in their bloodstream - but the film shortchanges it. The issues are explained clearly but it can't fill out the human drama, show how the events affect the characters. Only Ruffalo and Camp's characters are properly rounded. Hathaway's character insists that she is not just The Wife and has Something To Contribute, but in the film she is just The Wife, and you wonder how she ended up in such an insignificant role.
Still, beyond the shortcomings the film subverts the genre in that it doesn't make the victory into a victory. Haynes likes a Douglas Sirk ending: one that seems happy but probably isn't and here he gives us a victory that feels like a defeat.
