a compelling account of a drawn-out legal case in which a tenacious whistleblowing lawyer spent years pursuing DuPont for secretly poisoning customers through the use of toxic chemicals and products, including Teflon.
This is not an easy tale to dramatize for many reasons: it’s protracted, looking to outlive some of its participants; the hero’s research involves massive paperwork; the settings are unavoidably and unphotogenically drab; some of the characters, including the Bilott family, don’t do much except work and attend church; and the prospects for positive change for anyone on view would appear extremely limited to say the least.
Bilott does have a loyal supporter in his supervising partner at the law firm, Tom Terp . It takes a while, but Bilott’s investigation finally leads him to a nearly 50-year-old drug called PFOA, of which DuPont had dumped thousands of tons onto local land. When a discovery request results in what looks like hundreds of boxes of documents being delivered to Bilott’s office, you know any resolution will be a long time in coming. And so it is.
Unlike many other disruptors, Bilott is not a born attack dog, but like many in the law he can’t abide injustice and endeavors to see wrongs righted. At one point he gives his wife, who keeps popping out baby boys, a little history lesson in PFOA, which dates back to World War II days when early tests showed the drug prone to making rats develop cancer. But at a time when Teflon products were generating $1 billion per year, DuPont was regulating itself, with no oversight by the government.
MarkRuffalo