This is Mark Ruffalo’s movie. The lifelong activist picked up on the New York Times Magazine story and worked with Bilott directly in the making of it. His desperate performance is one of the only things propping Dark Waters up. Images courtesy Focus Features.
3/10 Dark Waters is by no means a bad movie, but it isn’t good, and it seems to know and be weirdly self-conscious about that.
Dark Waters, based on the New York Times Magazine Article “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare” by Nathaniel Rich, tells the true story of lawyer Rob Bilott (Mark Ruffalo, who also produces), a Cincinnati lawyer who spent 20 years litigating and shining a light on the hazardous dumping of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) by DuPont Industries. PFOA is used in the production of Teflon, the space-age non-stick cooking surface that was one of DuPont’s most popular products. Through litigation, Bilott produced a study linking PFOA exposure to six chronic health conditions, including kidney and testicular cancer, and produced documents proving DuPont had discovered these correlations in its own employees decades ago, but had declined to change their business practices because Teflon was making them so much money.
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