Film Pick of the Week: Dark Waters - Review by Yvette Huddleston

In the 1990s Bilott was a wealthy corporate lawyer whose job entailed representing big business and big money. However, his life was turned around when he was contacted by a farmer from West Virginia, where Bilott was born and raised, who told him that his cows were being poisoned by contaminated water from the nearby DuPont’s chemical plant.

Directed by Todd Haynes with a fine script by screenwriters Mario Correa and Matthew Michael Carnahan adapted from a 2016 New York Times article, the narrative follows Bilott’s journey to taking on the big bad corporate guys on behalf of the ordinary people whose lives they are ruining. It was a brave move to switch sides in this way and for Bilott it meant uncomfortable conversations with his horrified colleagues and initially sceptical wife Sarah (Anne Hathaway), but he was determined to do the right thing. And Ruffalo absolutely inhabits the role – empathetically portraying Bilott’s commitment, fervour and righteous anger as well as his outsider status. A native of West Virginia from humble beginnings, he was always a bit of an odd fit in the circles in which he was moving.

As the evidence of wrongdoing on a grand scale begins to mount, Bilott uses his knowledge of how big chemical companies work against them; it is a David and Goliath story with a fascinating twist. And while Bilott’s actions were undoubtedly heroic, none of this is glamourised – it took an awful lot of legwork, years of research and legal battles, to get a good result. The film does not skirt around this – we see Ruffalo hunched over boxes and boxes of documents, rifling through papers in an airless room, his own health beginning to suffer from the stress and responsibility of the huge task he has set himself.

The scenes focussing on boardroom debates and procedural detail are counterbalanced by electric courtroom encounters, bristling with barely contained, entirely justified, rage. At the centre of it all is a measured, invested performance from Ruffalo (he optioned the article and has an executive producer credit), who plays Bilott with the care and respect he clearly deserves. It all makes for riveting viewing.