Starring: Mark Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway, Tim Robbins, Bill Camp, and Victor Garber
Distributor: Universal Pictures International
Runtime: 127 mins. Reviewed in Mar 2020
| 
| 
This American drama is based on the 2016 article, “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare” written by Nathaniel Rich and published in the New York Times magazine. Parts of the story also appeared in later articles written by different journalists. It tells the story of a corporate defense attorney who instigated an environmental lawsuit against a large, influential American company with a long history of pollution.
Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo), a corporate lawyer from Cincinnati Ohio, gets a visit from farmer, Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp), asking him to explain a number of deaths in Parkersburg, West Virginia, that seem to be linked to the chemical Company, DuPont. DuPont is one of the world’s most powerful chemical manufacturers and Bilott investigates the claim that DuPont has been releasing the toxic chemical, C8 (perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA), into West Virginia’s water supply that has affected townspeople and their livestock.
As soon as DuPont began polluting the stream that runs through Tennant’s farm, things started going wrong with his cattle. Bilott visits the farm and expresses concern at what he sees. An attorney at DuPont, Phil Donnelly (Victor Garber), says he will help in any way he can. DuPont then floods Bilott with data to keep the truth hidden from him, but Robert Bilott works through all that he is given.Tim Robbins takes the role of Thomas Terp, Bilott’s supervisor on the environmental team of lawyers at his firm. Nobody in the town wants to take on a corporation as large as DuPont, because DuPont employs virtually everybody in the town. The effects of being exposed to a toxic chemical changed their mind, however, when people started dying of cancer as the legal battle went on.
Robert’s wife, Sarah (Anne Hathaway) is pregnant and he finds that DuPont has been running tests on a man-made chemical that is potentially affecting his wife. PFOA was the toxic chemical that DuPont used to make Teflon, and Sarah has Teflon all through her kitchen. The chemical that DuPont was releasing is known to cause cancer in people, animals and birth defects in babies, and gallons of toxic sludge had been dumped by DuPont upriver from Tennant’s farm. Tennant and his wife developed cancer and Robert initiated a class action, that the film’s concluding credits reveal forced DuPont to eventually settle for 671 million dollars. The legal fight against DuPont went on for more than a decade, and Tennant died by cancer before the film was finished.
Mark Ruffalo is outstanding as Robert Bilott, and excellently acts the unassuming hero who determinedly pursues a cover-up in spite of everything placed in his way. His acting and Todd Haynes’ astute direction build up a raft of feelings of acute dread. One watches this movie to realise that drinking water, cooking with Teflon, and washing can all be dangerous things to do. The uncomfortable drama leaves the viewer with a decided feeling that the problem presented on the screen is by no means solved and has the strong probability of never being so. The film tells us that the release of industrial chemicals is possibly affecting the water we drink, the air we breath, and the utensils we eat out of. At one level the movie is about a lone crusader who fights against a corrupt system. At another level, it is a movie about ordinary activities that everyone does, and its warnings hit hard. They hit hard enough to induce paranoid feelings that there are industries now that are continuing to do the very same things. This is a very compelling movie about a major social and health problem. It doesn’t involve the viewer in tense courtroom scenes. Rather, it is a film at the coal-face about coping with the climate of distrust that surrounds power, industrial systems of control, and the procedures of surveillance put in place to maintain them.
The movie reminds one of “Erin Brockovich” (2000), which was another fine film about pollution by a major industrial (energy) corporation. This film distinctively projects feelings of rising paranoia. It is about corporate greed and about people in powerful, influential institutions who look to be aware of what they are doing, but still keep doing it regardless of the consequences.
Peter W. Sheehan is Associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting.
12 Random Films…
