Ruffalo stars as Robert Billott, a Cincinnati, Ohio attorney for Taft Stettinius & Hollister, a firm that represents major corporations, including DuPont, one of the world's most powerful chemical manufacturers. Through personal ties, and against the wishes of his own colleagues, Billott decides to help a lowly cattle farmer from Parkersburg, West Virginia named Wilbur Tennant (played by Bill Camp, with beetle brows that make him look like Beau Bridges from a distance). Wilbur's cows have been getting sick, going insane, and dying off at an alarming rate, and he's convinced it's because DuPont poisoned the nearby water supply. He's right, of course, but proving it won't be easy, nor will establishing a chain of intentionality that might make DuPont liable for cleanup and restitution.
What follows is a detective story with a nice guy lawyer at its center. Robert Billott is convincingly portrayed by Ruffalo as a sort of human version of Droopy the Dog, a cartoon character who defeated flashier, more volatile adversaries by being unflappable, indomitable and polite, and showing up where his foes least expected it. Haynes uses wide shots to emphasize Ruffalo's modest height compared to looming costars like Tim Robbins (as Billott's boss Tom Terp). The actor's turtle-in-a-shell body language further emphasizes that this smart, ethical man is financially, politically, even scientifically outgunned when trying to prove that DuPont has been dumping toxic waste into West Virginia soil, causing cancer, distemper, and rotting teeth in humans and animals alike.
Moviegoers who keep up with environmental news (or who have read about the actual case that inspired "Dark Waters") know that the farmer's plight is a gateway to a wider discussion of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a byproduct of one of DuPont's most lucrative postwar products, teflon. This in turn leads to a wider and more alarming look at toxic chemicals that are spread through the water supply, enter human bodies, and stay there.
And it's that last bit of information that gives the movie a grim charge. At its most controlled and insinuating, "Dark Waters" is reminiscent of paranoid thrillers from the 1970s like "The Parallax View" and "Chinatown." In those kinds of movies, you know going in that you're going to see a story about how bad things are, thanks to corporate influence over government as well as the economy, but the extent of the corruption is still shocking, highlighting the implicit question: why fight, if the bad guys have already won? The answer, of course, is that you should fight because it's the right thing to do, and because even the promise of justice is slim, it's a public service of a more diminished kind to show people how broken the system is.
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