To accept the environmental thriller “Dark Waters” as a Todd Haynes film is both to marvel at the varied ground this indie stalwart has covered in his multi-faceted career and to realize that even the greats occasionally like to give their iconoclastic reputations a rest and instead flex their muscles doing dramatic justice to an already gripping story.
Not that there aren’t plenty of Haynes-like touches all over the tale of Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo), a corporate defense attorney who pulled a thread of local water contamination off a complaint from one West Virginia farmer and, over years, exposed poisonous, decades-long malfeasance on the part of chemical behemoth DuPont.