DARK WATERS: MARK RUFFALO COMMITTED ACTOR<

Dark Waters: between two episodes of Avengers, Mark Ruffalo met in 2016 Robert Bilott, lawyer from Ohio, business specialist in environmental law and direct witness to a political and financial machination of international scope. By exposing water pollution in Parkersburg, West Virginia by DuPont, the lawyer put his own life at risk. This is the starting point of the new film starring and produced by the 52-year-old actor, on the unscrupulous practices of the powerful chemical group DuPont de Nemours. The case is still ongoing.

Step by step, the viewer will be led to follow the tenacious work of the investigator over many years, stubbornly stubbornly uncovering the truth about the deadly pollution caused by toxic discharges from the DuPont factory into the waters. campaigns in the northeast of the country, and to raise awareness of the effects of compounds made by DuPont in our daily lives from the famous Teflon contained in our pans and other food packaging.

The film decides to focus first on the growing chaos in a West Virginia town near a dump of chemical pollutants (children with black teeth, cattle covered in lesions, abnormally high cancer rates), then to make us aware - at the same time as the main character, initially a lawyer-supporter of the defense of industries - of the shameful excesses of the American chemical colossus whose priority is profitability to the detriment of public health. From then on, the hero of Dark Waters will irremediably change sides and the judicial investigation thriller will be able to begin.

To carry out one of the biggest health scandals in history, Mark Ruffalo, who was only thinking of producing the film without playing the main character, convinced Todd Haynes, renowned for his shimmering and refined style (Far from Heaven, Carol ), to shed some light on this story.

@naimeiyao @ketzal That's the thing. I *would*, but it would still be so terrible, awful, and traumatizing. They do… https://t.co/TPUeCFMbF4

— Sarah 🦎 Anne ('Newt') 🌈 ❤️💜💙 Mon Jul 29 03:43:01 +0000 2019

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Result: a bias for sobriety, decors with exaggerated grayish tones and systematically untapped secondary characters (too bad for Tim Robbins or Anne Hathaway, wife of the hero confined to the perfect mother of a family), in favor of the strict narrative and the evolution of the investigation rich in adventures fueled by the fraudulent practices of DuPont, led by the humanist lawyer with a big heart.

On the theme of abuse of power, one inevitably thinks of other films of denunciation (The President's Men by Pakula, Revelations by Michael Mann or Erin Brockovich by Soderbergh on polluting waters 20 years ago already), and we think that Mark Ruffalo may have won his bet by playing on his notoriety to make the general public react to the ecological cause (remember that the latter founded the NGO Water Defense 10 years ago).

However, despite the efforts made to attest to a corrupt system, it is deplorable that the film does not quite live up to its subject when the legal epic around the figure of the lawyer could have gaining heroic charge in the face of the specter of government corruption whose more nuanced, and otherwise formally threatening, would have resulted in a more nuanced climate of suspicion during the film and less consensual in the end.

Dark Waters, a film by Todd Haynes with Mark Ruffalo and Anne Hathaway. Duration 2h6.

Scenario: Mario Correa and Matthew Michael Carnahan. Director of photography: Edward Lachman. Editing: Affonso Gonçalves. Costumes: Christopher Peterson. Music: Marcelo Zarvos.

DuPont was ranked second in the Top 100 Air Pollutants in the United States in 2016, a report published by the Economic Policy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amhers.