Dark Waters

Legal thriller with strong pro-environment message

By Alberto Sclaverano

2019 American legal thriller Dark Waters draws inspiration from real events. It is certainly not the first movie of its kind. In fact, it belongs to a long series of films based on true stories of common people that succeed in making a difference and uncover the crimes against the environment and the people committed by public or private authorities. 

Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich is one of the main examples. In the case of Dark Waters, though, the approach is a bit different. It is way more focused on the detailed legal elements of the whole story, even if it maintains a classic cinematic look.

Directed by Todd Haynes (best known for the Bob Dylan bio-pic I’m Not There, 2007, and the romantic drama Carol, 2015), and distributed by Focus Features at the end of 2019, the movie chronicles the twenty-yeas long legal battle, started in 1998, by lawyer Robert “Rob” Bilott (played by Mark Ruffalo) to prove that the chemical manufacturing corporation DuPont was responsible for and extreme increase in cancer related death (both in humans and farm animals) in Parkersburg, West Virginia (with health’s damage extended to the whole state and to the neighboring state of Ohio). 

The reasons are connected to DuPont’s use of PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid) to produce Teflon (an element common in American homes at that time) and then releasing toxic waste in the waters near the farmers’ lands. 

It should be noted that Rob soon discovered that not only did DuPont violate the law by dumping toxic wastes in the environment, but it also knew for decades that PFOA was a cancerous substance and decided to keep the results of the internal research unknown to the general public. 

Rob’s battle to bring the truth to light and to obtain compensation for poisoned farmers would span several years, costing him a lot of personal suffering, including problems with his wife, Sarah (played by Anne Hathaway).

Based on the 2016 “The New York Times Magazine” article The Lawyer Who Became DuPont's Worst Nightmare by Nathaniel Rich, and on Robert Bilott’s own personal memoir (Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer's Twenty-Year Battle against DuPont, 2019), Dark Waters has the structure and rhythm of a thriller and the content of a political drama. 

It depicts both the stubbornness of a man disposed to risk his own personal stability to help others and the absurd loopholes in the legal system that, for several years, permitted DuPont to postpone the inquiry and avoid the exposure of the real facts and the payment of the compensation. 

The whole story has only a partial happy ending because Rob’s final legal win arrived when several of the people he had represented in the trial had already passed away due to cancer. It nevertheless shows that a single person can make a difference, and that the system can be repaired, even when it appeared broken beyond limits.

This powerful story has a clear link to the climate crisis because it reminds us how much harm we can do to ourselves by poisoning and polluting the ecosystem. But it also stresses how important it is to have agencies, such as the EPA (United States Environmental Protection Agency) in the USA, that could play an oversight role. This is even more important today than it was twenty years ago, because the attack by authoritarian governments and far-right parties against these kinds of agencies has reached a level never seen since their establishment in the 1960s and 1970s. Resisting collectively, as Rob Bilott’s personal battle has proven, is more necessary than ever.