THREE STRONG LATE ENTRIES BRING MOVIES BACK TO HUMANITY

By Dominique Paul Noth

Mark Ruffalo in "Dark Waters"

Three films late in 2019 or early in 2020  seemed to proudly return American film-making to the gripping investigative storytelling that television had pretty much taken over in longer forms than two-hour stories. These are topnotch cinema drawn from real life where dogged Americans are demonstrating again and again how the arc of the universe “slowly bends toward justice.”

Actors and directors expand the best elements of Law and Order and Frontline into important stories that reassure us of the difference dogged persistence can make – and entertain us with potent moments in the bargain.

In order of success as film-making, they are Todd Haynes’ Dark Waters, in which a plodding unexpectedly heroic corporate lawyer for elitist companies, played with pudgy stubbornness by Mark Ruffalo, took on DuPont in a continuing 20-year battle to own up to its chemical Teflon’s  destruction of the world environment.

The movie could have relied on deformed carcasses and angry farmers to tell the tale, but it delves grippingly into the world of chemical formulas and courtroom delays and strategy to keep us on the edge of our hope of success against the odds. There are even moments of paranoia that we understand plus surprisingly effective use of visual effects to capture the polluted water supplies creeping into our farms and homes. Not surprisingly but certainly with nastiness, the power of money and corporate influence forces every step forward to cope with two steps back.

Annette Benning and Adam Driver in "The Report"

This is closely followed in quality (and similar power struggle) by writer-director Scott Z. Burns’ The Report (with a blocked out middle word in the title that in reality spells Torture) streaming through Amazon.  It is focused on a real-life Senate report on the CIA that is still hidden from public view. 

But it took a seven year pursuit by an idealistic and growingly angrier investigator at a Senate computer deep in the bowels of the CIA to just give the public the 500-page executive summary outlining how US agents used “waterboarding” and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques (think torture, such as electrodes on genitals, sleep deprivation, screaming noises and other niceties that left scores of captured combatants unable to be processed in US courts and also handed Isis a major propaganda victory called Guantanamo).

The real-life investigator is played by Adam Driver whose coiled intensity keeps us alert to the smallest advances toward sunlight of the summary, which was successfully blocked by the Obama administration though that president instantly halted the torture.  The decision was made not to prosecute the CIA agents who were following orders from the Bush administration, a human rights decision that angered such senators as Diane Feinstein and Sheldon Whitehouse (played straight ahead and quietly by Annette Benning and John Rothman, with other realistic portraits and dead ringers in looks as Jon Hamm as Obama’s chief of staff and Ted Levine as CIA boss John Brennan). 

Who finally got to unfold what makes for quite a study and may anger audiences since too few Americans have absorbed the lingering consequences of all this – or realize who the real heroes were and what fallout remains. 

Driver is all over the 2019 screens and probably makes his biggest box office impression in “Star Wars: The Return of Skywalker” and his likely award winning presence in “Marriage Story,” but this entry is not chopped liver. Presented as imaginative relentless pursuit behind computer screens and into the workings of dark sites, psychological hokum and coverups (the inescapable conclusion is that torture never worked as expected) the story is fascinatingly important in penetrating one of the US’ darkest chapters.

Michael B. Jordan in "Just Mercy"

The third movie is the most like a TV movie but with big-screen moments – emotionally simple and straight ahead with a screenplay full of amazingly articulate participants in the Alabama death row system.  But this is Alabama, where racism and fear still seem revealed in outlandishly brutal moments.

Just Mercy is based on the tireless work to help prisoners, mainly black, denied criminal justice since the 1980s and the creation of the continuing Equal Justice Initiative with Michael B. Jordan playing its founder and author Bryan Stevenson and Jamie Foxx as the cynical death row prisoner Walter McMillian whose story became famous through “60 Minutes.” (The judge who doesn’t listen is a remarkable physical ringer for Jeff Sessions.)

A relatively new director  Destin Daniel Cretton trusts his actors in a straight at the heart portrayal of the events, particularly blessed in Rob Morgan as a doomed Vietnam veteran and the always amazing Tim Blake Nelson as the twisted and scarred white honkie who recants.  The lead actors are okay but it is these supporting actors who score the biggest input.

Perhaps partly because of sympathy to the criminal justice work underlying “Just Mercy,” I was caught up in how crisply even though sometimes lacking in nuance was this investigation of minds changing and redemption.  But all three films reminded me again of the power that good empathetic acting can bring to all manner of roles.

“The Report” shines in its casting, which allows the script to fly through scenes knowing the actors will land the goodies with a look or a reaction.

“Dark Waters” not only reminds viewers that star actresses like Anne Hathaway and chameleon actors like Ruffalo and Tim Robbins can surprise us by naturalistic underplaying.  It is also a pleasure to see established film actors prove their range.  I was particularly struck by how Victor Garber and Bill Pullman, comic staples in “Sleepless in Seattle,” here can pull up quite startling and different emotions from the world of corporate lawyering.

All three films do justice to their stories.  But “Dark Waters” also has illuminating layers of social commentary that patrons will respond to.

Other recent film reviews:

JoJo Rabbit 

Little Women 

1917 

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.