There's nothing here that you have not seen. Go ahead and call it "Aaron Brockovich." But director Todd Haynes still makes it entirely engaging and painfully true that death is a number compared to liability and that is how you can sustain cold hearted industry. Made more gut wrenching is how they believed the ends justified the means.
Mark Ruffalo tackles the lawyer with the conscience wonderfully. Suffering under the weight of what he must do and what then envelops his small world. It's heroic in how much he does sacrifice and let's face it, these stories don't end well. What director Haynes does is put a face to the not-on-the-books crime. And though, it only is a civil case somehow you sense the frustration of the town. Not played as rubes but believing that a massive corporation who funded and gave perks to sustain the village wouldn't willingly destroy it. As we know now versus 1998, they knew...if not for simple morbid curiosity. Then sat on the information as it fed the machine decades later, we are now more informed and much more paranoid. Everything we eat or touch or...breathe we are closer to death.
I was in that area in 1998...and the news then spent less time on it then I recall. As a college bound student, I heard murmurs of DuPont and jokes were made of this. Now...it seems bitterly grim. How many lives were destroyed because of shady dealings. When you peel the onion, you do weep.
I love this flick. The flavor of that era is pitch perfect. The backroads of an industrial town, built under poor chemistry just sweats disease. And you walk out angered by it. The fight continues to this day.
