'Minamata': A Timely Reminder Of Industrial Greed & Johnny Depp's Talent [Berlin Review]

In the sort of disheartening yet unsurprising coincidence that has become a fairly regular feature of Life Under Plutocracy, on Monday, The Washington Post carried a story about an EPA proposal to imminently roll back environmental protections against mercury pollution, and today Andrew Levitas‘ “Minamata,” a conventional but moving and well-crafted reminder of why such protections are vital, premieres at the Berlin Film Festival. It’s the based-in-truth story of the last work of photojournalism completed by celebrated photographer Gene Smith (Johnny Depp): the 1972 Life Magazine essay that exposed the knowing toxification of the waters around Minamata, Japan, by a local chemical company, and the resultant ravages of the horrific neurological syndrome—still known as “Minamata disease”—that arises from severe mercury poisoning. And though that set-up might set off alarm bells for some worthy yet tone-deaf, cross-cultural white-savior hagiography, Levitas’ unusually even-handed approach works to balance the film’s inspirational true story with its tragic real-world context, by refusing to overstate Smith’s personal heroics, while sensitively outlining the everyday heroism of the ordinary men and women most grievously affected. 

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That balance develops gradually though: our introduction to Smith is pure rock’n’roll. Benoit Delhomme‘s lively, romantic camera captures him from odd, jazzy angles reeling around a home darkroom in his small graffitioed New York City apartment to the epochal strains of “I’d Love to Change the World” by blues-rock band Ten Years After. A Dexedrine pillbox here, a swig from a bottle of brown liquor there, the endless clicking of a camera’s shutter and later, a blustering visit to lock horns with Life editor Robert Hayes (Bill Nighy). It seems Levitas, and co-writers David K. Kessler, Stephen Deuters, and Jason Forman want us to imagine Smith as a cross between Hunter S. Thompson, Robert Capa, and Ned Flanders’ beatnik Dad: a beret-sporting, hellraising, tortured genius, grown bitter that his days of greatness are behind him.

But then Aileen (Minami), a young Japanese woman, shows up at his door under the pretext of a FujiFilm endorsement and after a night of jazz in smoky clubs, she reveals her real agenda—in a scene shot almost like that moment in a film noir when the femme fatale reveals what she actually needs from the hard-bitten private eye. She wants Smith to come back with her to Japan to document an ongoing industrial poisoning scandal in the small community of Minamata whose poor residents are reliant on the nearby Chisso chemical plant for employment, but also on the poisoned fish from the seas Chisso is polluting for sustenance. After a brief demurral, Smith agrees to go, and even persuades Hayes, whose editorship is also in its waning days, to stake him for one last roll of the potentially-explosive-photo-essay dice. 

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Once in Japan, aside from a few rather cliched flourishes, such as the machine-gun-rhythmic PTSD flashbacks, Smith endures through his time as a WWII combat photographer, and the desultory, thankfully underplayed love story (Gene and Aileen did in fact get married) the film settles gratifyingly into a lower gear, becoming more expansive and meditative. Ryuichi Sakamoto‘s rather lovely score is perhaps a little too present, but never overbearing, as we are introduced to a broad swath of supporting characters, most notably Mitsuo Yamazaki (Hiroyuki Sanada, last seen as Yakuza boss Akihiko in “Avengers: Endgame“), a local citizen activist and organizer; Kiyoshi (Ryo Kase from Scorsese’s “Silence” and Kore-eda’s “Our Little Sister“), a film cameraman afflicted with the disease whose hands somehow do not tremble so much when he is shooting footage; Nojima (Jun Kunimura from “Midway” and Na Hong-jin’s “The Wailing“) the heartless, business-first boss of the Chisso plant; and the Matsumuras (Akiko Iwase and Japanese superstar Tadonobu Asano), the loving parents of the congenitally blind, mute, and paralyzed girl who will eventually be the subject of Smith’s single most famous photograph. (In actuality that photo is called “Tomoko Uemara in her Bath” and look it up if you don’t know it— it is indeed a heartbreakingly beautiful example of masterful photojournalist portraiture.) 

Of course, despite a supporting cast stacked with some of the most internationally recognizable Japanese actors working today, it is Johnny Depp’s name above the title (and below, too, as he also produces). And Depp gives his best performance in quite some time—despite sporting Smith’s signature headgear over a shock of scouring-pad gray hair and a bristling beard, it’s the least costumey we’ve seen him, arguably since before Jack Sparrow.  And it is certainly the first time we’ve seen him truly subvert his rock-star glam swagger with a real undertow of melancholy and vulnerability: he portrays Smith’s alcoholism and amphetamine addiction as actual weaknesses that make him maudlin and defeatist, rather than as tacitly admirable evidence of a life lived large. And while there are scenes of masculine bravado (especially with Nighy, who is also thankfully using his inside voice here) and anti-authoritarian rebellion, Depp’s Smith frequently cedes center stage to the issue he is covering and the humans experiencing it. In being so very much not a star vehicle, or at least a deceptively modest one, “Minimata” rehabilitates Depp’s shaky recent track record in a significant way: by reminding us, in moments, of just what a soulful and sincerely generous actor he can be, when he is moved by the material as opposed to the material moving around him. 

Levitas does little to reinvent the historical fight-against-injustice wheel, but he does keep it turning smoothly. And like Smith’s famous photograph, the overriding impression coming out of “Minamata” is not of the specifics of suffering and struggle, the wasted limbs and deformed fingers but of the painfully beautiful expression of love that is written across the face of the mother who bathes her afflicted daughter — an expression infinitely humane and relatable. Within the narrow, conservative confines of the Hollywood true-story historical drama, “Minamata” does justice to a philosophy best illustrated, ironically, by evil company honcho Nojima when he queries “Do you understand the idea of ‘parts per million?'” He is attempting to justify the deaths and suffering of the local community as essentially the acceptable collateral damage for industrial progress but inadvertently reminds us that just a few parts per million are enough to effect significant change. [B-]

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