Welcome to The Weekend Watch, a weekly column focusing on a movie—new, old or somewhere in between, but out either in theaters or on a streaming service near you—worth catching on a cozy Friday night or a lazy Sunday morning. Comments welcome!
It’s hard to go a single day without seeing a new sign of the corporate-driven apocalypse, the enshittification of this world and its public (and private) services thanks to the God of Capitalism, profit. Whether it’s about the film industry’s obsession with IP movies, our universities’ insistent investment in the military industrial complex or tech companies replacing every good thing in this world with artificial intelligence, there’s plenty to be pessimistic about on a large-scale level. And this specific kind of misery loves cinematic company, so let’s dive headfirst into the polluted deep end with the 2019 legal drama Dark Waters, recently added to Netflix.
Directed by Todd Haynes, who recently didn’t see jack squat at the Oscars for his excellent May December, Dark Waters recounts the real story of corporate defense lawyer Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo), who is slowly pushed to the right side of history as he investigates and sues DuPont for poisoning the water, the air and pretty much every living thing that partakes of either. The salt in the wound is that Bilott is employed by a firm that predominantly works to keep chemical companies out of trouble, so he’s burning bridges just by thinking about the case—let alone fighting it tooth and nail for years.
Haynes captures this crushing, consuming obsession in sickly blues, grays and blacks. His movie takes place either in a snooty office allergic to this kind of work, an increasingly tense household, or in the unofficial company town that hates anyone disparaging their biggest employer. I got flashbacks to visiting my parents in Arkansas, where everything is owned by (and named after) Walmart’s Walton family. Arkansans don’t care if Walmart is perpetuating the opioid crisis (it is), they care if food is on the table in front of them while they try to kick this stupid painkiller addiction. Jamelle Bouie wrote something about Dark Waters on his Letterboxd account that stuck with me: “The true horror of capitalism isn’t just that it destroys lives, but that the people afflicted are thankful for the opportunity to work.” It’s in this world of small-scale injustices and globally destructive corporate decisions that Dark Waters exists, blackhearted, cynical and dog tired.