Todd Haynes brings a sense of dread and helplessness to every image in Dark Waters (2019). The film is virtually a master class in pacing and composition, marking another stage of aesthetic development in Haynes’ remarkable career. But Dark Waters, for this viewer at least, cannot escape the limitations of this particular breed of sub-genre: the “dramatized PSA”.
Dark Waters has everything the similarly plotted The Report (2019) didn’t have; it has character development, it has ambience, it has a sense of place, and above all else it has visual style. Yet, for all of this, Dark Waters is no more memorable than The Report. A day after first seeing Haynes’ film I can’t say any images leap to mind when I think about it. The clearest memory I have of the film is the final title card that informs us viewers that DuPont is still quite literally getting away with murder. Maybe that is the point, maybe Dark Waters is designed simply to raise awareness and provoke outrage.
American movies have always had this tendency to take up a crusade. Some filmmakers (Stanley Kramer comes to mind) make an entire career out of “political message” flicks. But what does that matter when the storytelling is so grounded in the dialogue and plot that it forgoes any direct cinematographic expression? This is probably why we still teach Godard, Gorin, Eisenstein, Vertov, Costa-Gravas, and Dovzhenko in film schools, not Stanley Kramer and Sydney Lumet. American films, almost as a rule, have tremendous difficulty in the mainstream of Hollywood pulling off any political messaging outside of the satire. The major exceptions I can think of are Robert Altman, Spike Lee, and John Frankenheimer.
