Dark Waters has it's heard in the right place but it's lacking as a drama

Todd Haynes's Dark Water (2019) is one in a long line of movies about crusading lawyers taking on the evils of the corporate world - Erin Brocovitch and A Civil Action as 2 of the classics; also the TV series Damages, q.v.) - some more successfully than others. Though this film's heart is in the right place - and it's based on true events, as told in a magazine article from Nathanial Rich, it suffers from one major problem: There's no tension and no surprise and little to no evolution of character. We know from the start that the film is about polluted land and water, and there's no question as to who's responsible: Dupont Chemicals. The story line entails the struggles of a young corporate lawyer, played by Mark Ruffalo, to take on Dupont, for which he has to discover exactly what chemical(s) polluted the groundwater and precisely what these chemical do to people and how and when Dupont became aware of the dangers. This process involves tedious legal research, and that just is not enough to give a movie any gas. To a degree, Ruffalo's character changes over the course of the film - he starts off as a newly minted partner in a big corporate firm who encounters lots of resistance from other partners as he takes on this potential class-action suit (What are we? Ambulance chasers?), and in fact the firm had hoped to lure Dupont as a client - but not enough is made of this conflict, as the voices of opposition are pathetic and the head of the firm comes around to Ruffalo's side pretty easily. If this were a fiction rather than fact-based, it might have been good to see R leave the firm and take the case on his own, w/ consequences to follow. But as it stands, the film feels flat and the conclusion inevitable. That said, MR does good job w/ what he's got, and you've got to root for him throughout, he's so clearly in the right facing off against those clearly in the wrong. But all told the movie would have been stronger if it were a bit more subtle: the swelling crescendos from the score toward the conclusion were way over the top, for example. The drama should be enough to stand on its own at that point.