April 2020 | Sight&Sound | 15Thinking outside the box: Mark Ruffalo and Todd Haynes, making Dark Waterstouches some chord in Bilott and sets in train his
own dark reckoning with corporate malfeasance.
Remarkably, Tom Turp (Tim Robbins), his boss
at Taft, lets him proceed with the investigation
into DuPont, despite the fact that the company
is one of the firm’s biggest corporate clients.
“I love the class distinctions that describe
the film,” explains Haynes. “That sense of
Rob not fitting in to the Taft pedigree, of not
having attended Yale or Harvard but Ohio State
University; that meant something there, acutely.
It still blows my mind to this day, after all of this
and after Hollywood has come in and made a film
about Rob’s life, that the real Tom Turp has never
once asked Rob out to a drink or a meal. And yet ina way they were the lone soldiers at certain times,
standing up in favour of taking the firm in this
direction and risking its reputation as they did.”
Part of the fascination of Dark Waters is being
ushered deep into Republican country, a place
you don’t see so often in Hollywood cinema.
West Virginian farmers like Wilbur Tennant
and his brother Jim, and the other local people
affected by the toxic mess DuPont created, are
forced to kick back against a system they’ve
previously endorsed. “These are not bleeding-
heart liberals, not Democrats, not activists,
not Mark Ruffalos,” says Haynes. “They’re
unlikely candidates to take on what they did,
to learn what they did. They shared so much,
they see the world utterly differently now,
but it doesn’t really bring them together.”
That sense of disunity and disillusionment, of
coming unmoored from a system you believed
would protect you, is beautifully expressed in
Haynes’s regular director of photography Ed
Lachman’s wintry images, which capture a
sense of pervasive rot and creeping disquiet.
For all its bleakness, reviews of Dark Waters in
the US have been mostly positive. Haynes seems
more resolutely, explicitly activist with this film,
aiming at parts of the cinematic landscape where
he may not have figured hitherto. “There was
something very muddled and grown-up about
this movie in an era that I find to be increasingly
infantile and disturbing, particularly so in
the media culture and the franchise movies
that have dominated entertainment. I didn’t
know if this movie would connect to those
audiences and those expectations, and there are
undoubtedly some people out there who don’t
want to watch something like this. But there are
a lot of people who really need it right now.”
Dark Waters is out now in UK cinemas
and was reviewed in our last issueBy Kieron Corless
The genesis of Todd Haynes’s new film Dark
Waters went something like this. In January
2016 the New York Times published an article by
Nathaniel Rich chronicling the Cincinnati lawyer
Rob Bilott’s punishing crusade against the US
corporation DuPont. After painstaking, years-
long investigation, Bilott was able to prove that
not only had DuPont been contaminating land
and water in West Virginia for several decades
with waste containing the chemical PFOA, but
it had also attempted to deny and cover up the
severely detrimental effects on public health.
This was no localised case, it transpired. PFOA
usage for a variety of purposes pre-dated US
regulatory tightening in 1970 and had thereby
slipped the net (it was used in Teflon products
until relatively recently), meaning that an
estimated 99 per cent of the world’s population
has been exposed to it. The local lawsuits that
ensued saw DuPont paying out colossal sums.
A classic David vs Goliath narrative, in other
words, and something of a gift to Hollywood.
That the director who took it on turned out
to be Todd Haynes seems a little surprising, at
least on first inspection. Dark Waters stars Mark
Ruffalo who, in his twin role as a producer,
was the one who initially approached Haynes.
“What Mark wouldn’t have known at that
point is how much l absolutely love the great
whistleblower films,” Haynes told me on a
recent trip to London. “The ‘paranoia trilogy’
by director Alan J. Pakula and cinematographer
Gordon Willis in the 70s, for example – The
Parallax View, Klute, All the President’s Men: these
are films that in various ways riffed on a post-60s
sense of alienation and systemic corruption.”
That serendipitous aesthetic attachment plus
Haynes’s own political instincts made the project
hard to resist. But since we already know the
outcome with whistleblower films based on true
stories, what other forms of viewer investment
are being mobilised? “It’s very much about this
focus on the present tense of a narrative, about
following the creation of a story,” Haynes suggests.
“And the cost felt by the individuals who uncover
stories of this magnitude and start to experience
the consequences. It’s also about being inside
these locked-off corporate spaces and getting this
sense of the pervasive powers of the world.”
All those elements are certainly present in Dark
Waters, but as a director long attuned to individual
unease and isolation, and the subtle markers of
class identity, Haynes brings his own emphases.
At Taft, the well-heeled Cincinnati law firm where
Bilott diligently plies his trade, you get the sense
from the off that he isn’t altogether comfortable,
his family’s rural origins in West Virginia making
him prone to what Haynes calls “perpetual
instability”. A plea for help from a farmer, Wilbur
Tennant (Bill Camp), who lives close to Bilott’s
grandmother and whose sheep have been dying
by the dozen owing to the poisoned local waters,TOXIC AVENGER
Dark Waters is a lot more
morally straightforward than
the average Todd Haynes film- but no more reassuring
INTERVIEW
‘There was something muddled
and grown-up about this movie
in an era I find increasingly
infantile and disturbing’
NEXT UP: THE VELVET
UNDERGROUNDHaynes’s first documentary feature will be
about The Velvet Underground. The interview
subjects, around 20 in total, range from
surviving members of the band, John Cale and
Moe Tucker, to those who personally knew the
musicians, including the actor Mary Woronov
and the late Jonas Mekas (see page 91). The
newly recorded interviews will be interspersed
with a wide array of archival footage, much of it
never seen before. The film is due to be released
theatrically and on Apple’s streaming platform.