Spotlight - In the tradition of newspaper expose movies
Spotlight is the latest in a series of one-word-title, excellent, late year movie releases that have included Trumbo and Room. Newspaper and broadcast expose movies have a long history in film. If the expose is about a real story, as in this case, they have inherent drama and often are a gift to a script writer who can take a dramatic story that’s pretty much already written and “rip it from the headlines”. These movies can be fact based like All The President’s Men, Good Night and Good Luck, or can be somewhat inspired by a version of truth like Network, Citizen Caine, Front Page and The China Syndrome. The latest offering is Spotlight, sadly, a true story about reporters at the Boston Globe who uncovered the pervasive scandal of child sex abuse by Catholic clergymen that was covered up by higher officials in the church. Spotlight was an investigative reporting unit at the Globe that had the luxury to spend a lot of time and effort on a big story, in this case the 2001 story of an individual Catholic priest who abused a minor and the subsequent cover-up of the incident by Cardinal Law (names are named in this movie). As the investigation progresses, Spotlight finds that this story is just tip of a huge iceberg, a pattern of abuse by priests in different places, as far back as the information goes.
Hints and small stories about abusive priests had surfaced for many decades, but had been treated as isolated events to be dealt with internally by the church, which made a practice of transferring the priests to different cities and parishes, covering the story in layers of church hierarchy and doing nothing else. It didn’t help that citizens and police didn’t intervene, having spent their lives being told about how virtuous the church was. There were a lot of people with dirty hands. Settlements were made with individual victims, documents were sealed and gag orders were signed. Lawyers, victims and people who knew victims were kept in the dark, thinking that their case was unique.
In this movie, a new boss at the Globe, Marty Baron (Liev Shreiber), assigns the four reporter Spotlight unit to investigate the story. The unit consists of reporters Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Robby Robinson (Micheal Keaton), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) and Steve Kurkjian (Gene Amoroso). Resistance starts immediately. Baron is from New York, is Jewish, and doesn’t appreciate just how essential deference to the church is in heavily Catholic and Irish Boston; he’s seen as an outsider with a grudge. The unit, however, is a known factor in Boston and their work commands respect. Once the facts, denials and innuendoes begin to pile up, the story, which is not public yet, starts to acquire momentum among Globe management, including publisher Ben Bradley Jr (John Slattery) who realize that they are on to something really big that goes way beyond a few abusive priests in Boston, as if that were not bad enough. Eventually, a number of newspaper staff realize that they had hints and small stories about this for many years, but the pieces had not been assembled and the practice continued unreported.
A movie like Spotlight has built-in drama. Any of us who were not hiding under a rock in 2002 recall what a shocking story this was, so a film like this doesn’t have to do much other than stay on course and tell the story. Spotlight does that very well. It has many of the long-used elements of newspaper movies like reporters telling their bosses, “this is a big story”, reporters running for cabs and stacks of newspapers running through printing presses. It is missing boys in nickers shouting out headlines on the street corner, but other than that, it could be a news movie in almost any era. The fact that the story is told so conventionally works well since you don’t have to figure out where the movie is going and can focus on the numerous details, names and events of the conspiracy.
Director Tom McCarthy has a short list of films to his name. The only other one I have seen was The Visitor (2007), an excellent small movie about a New York college professor who gets involved in the lives of 2 illegal immigrants. Direction and dialog is concise and well paced, and the development of this complex story is kept simple enough to not overwhelm a viewing audience. Acting is not excessively dramatic, but, like the rest of the movie, develops as the characters begin to realize just what they have uncovered. The performances are not virtuoso, but everybody is as good as they need to be. They don’t distract from the story with high levels of acting dramatics. There’s no action or FX in the movie. Most of it is dialog, close up cinematography and basic well done drama. I’m not seeing Oscars among the actors, but nobody needs to be ashamed. Spotlight is currently sitting at an exalted 98 on Rotten Tomatoes and 8.6 on IMDB. I have to admit that I would not put it that high, but I do think it’s an excellent movie of a sort that can be very dreary or preachy. If you’re tired of predictable holiday fare or overdone action movies, (or is that predictable action movies and overdone holiday fare), Spotlight is an excellent alternative.
