‘Minamata’ Film Review: Johnny Depp Photographs Environmental Disaster in Urgent Biopic
thewrap.comTomoko (Muneaki Kitsukawa) — the young daughter of his host family — the real song drops on the soundtrack, a moment of excessive underlining.
Another moment, where Smith reflects on rejecting a bribe from a Chisso executive, is complicated by unnecessarily non-linear storytelling and some aggressive scoring from composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.Cinematographer Benoît Delhomme (“At Eternity’s Gate) crafts a naturalistic look with practical lighting and a fluid camera, rendering the film with a dark beauty, but Levitas also incorporates archival and recreated footage of the protests at Chisso, as well as capturing the photographic process with slow, almost completely still black-and-white sequences.
Levitas has a lot of ideas about how to express this story cinematically, and he throws many at the screen, so many it starts to feel a bit too busy; as with Smith’s stark images, less could have been more powerful.As a film, “Minamata” is more than just a biopic, reflecting the important social impact of photography, although — as a slideshow of images from pollution disasters, oil spills, toxic waste poisoning and more are shown over the credits — one has to wonder what true change has been made.
Smith and his fellow photojournalists endanger themselves to help us see the horrors around us, exposing evil to light and freezing its effects in time.
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