Bad waters, legal thrillers on the environment / TRAILER

'Bad waters' by Todd Haynes is a green film for the environment, but also a legal thriller inspired by a true story, that of Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) environmental lawyer protagonist of a grueling legal battle lasting nineteen years against the chemical giant DuPont. A battle not a little if we consider that it was a question of representing 70 thousand citizens of Ohio and Virginia, whose drinking water had been contaminated by the uncontrolled spill of PFOA (perfluorooctanic acid). It all starts on January 6, 2016, when the New York Times talks about Bilott, partner of the Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP law firm, who discovered how a chemical had been contaminating a rural community for years. The film, released on February 20 with the Eagle, has a horror cadence: the Tennants, agricultural owners for generations, begin to lose their livestock. Their skin is filled with lesions, the eyes are circled in red, a white drool drips from the mouth and the teeth turn black. Convinced that the cause is a toxic spill from the nearby Dry Run landfill, where the DuPont-owned Washington Works plant discharges its waste, Wilbur Tennant has been trying for years to obtain unnecessary answers. Desperate, he eventually turns to Bilott, who spent time in West Virginia as a child, in Parkersburg, right next to the Tennant farm. "What Mark Ruffalo could not have known, is how much I was a secret fan of this kind of film - says Haynes -. I doubt I am the only one to have such a great admiration for the '70s paranoia trilogy' of Alan Pakula (and Gordon Willis) - A ring for Inspector Klute, Why an Assassination and All the President's Men - or for the films that followed in the following decades, such as Mike Nichols' Silkwood and Insider - Behind Michael's truth Mann. There has always been something to draw me towards this genre, which goes far beyond discovering how powerful people can make a bad end. " "In Bad Waters - continues the director - everything is based on the character of Rob Bilott, non-hero par excellence, whose ideas on normal business practices are overturned by his discoveries on DuPont. Wary, impartial and circumspect in nature, Bilott, as many typical 'moles', he is already a solitary figure when the story begins. And as always, isolation, like a virus, insinuates itself into the evolution of the story, spreading not only to Wilbur Tennant, but to all the different characters , weaving different classes, afflicting public life, family life and, in its wake, religious life. The truth is that, despite having solid ties - concludes Haynes -, challenging powerful interest groups, however, ends up creating isolation as well as seriously questioning faculties and personal values. A film like Bad Water describes - in the smallest detail - this process ". In the cast, besides Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway, Tim Robbins and Bill Pullman.