Spotlight

Spotlight, based upon the Boston Globe’s 2002 expose on sex abuse within the Catholic Church, is a film that takes a familiar story, but pulls back the curtain to reveal the blood, sweat, and groundwork it took to uncover it all. It presents Boston not as a sprawling city, but as a small-town mindset, heavily under control of the church and prone to closing ranks to protect its own. It would sound absurd if the text at the very end didn’t occupy three slides worth of cities with their own sex abuse scandals.

How could something like this have happened? Well, it’s easy to understand when you step back and look at the bigger picture. There’s an element of class issues at play here, with poorer sections being heavily involved and dependent upon the presence of a religious institution. If that institution has enough power in that area, it can easily hide behind its power to silence detractors and whistleblowers. I applaud these journalists for exposing this breach of conduct, and while it hasn’t completely reformed the institution, it has caused massive cracks to show.

In-between new revelations of just how deep this corruption goes, and well-paced potboiler elements, Spotlight allows for human faces to react to the horrors. While spilling out the skeletons of the local community’s closets sounds like a great way to endanger their careers and cause massive emotional fallout, they just keep going. By 2003, the Globe’s Spotlight team had published hundreds and hundreds of articles detailing survivor’s stories, names and locations of priests, and the in-house corruption that led to a constant reshuffling of clergy members.

There’s a complexity at work, but it never feels too hard to understand or too self-indulgent upon its own importance. As this small team of journalists stare down a massive problem, completely unaware of how deep it goes, they look for answers and where to place the blame. Each of them has a moment of awakening that there is no one place to lay the blame, that it extends to everyone, and dumb luck was the only thing keeping them from becoming a victim.

The ensemble is a tightly moving unit, with every player delivering solid work. What’s most refreshing is that no major scenes were added in which the actors could genuflect and emote to the heavens. It’s a quiet movie, filled with quiet, lived in performances with small moments that linger for their naked emotions and complex thoughts. Michael Keaton’s slow burn realization that this happened at his own high school, while he was a student no less, and he escaped through the happenstance of picking a different sport is a reminder of what a tremendous actor Keaton is. I feel as if he is undervalued, and such quiet work is no less effective or memorable than his larger fury in last year’s Birdman.

Orbiting him are Mark Ruffalo as a reporter to starts off curious and slowly goes manic as the case unfolds before him, Rachel McAdams as the quiet, sincere heart of the film, Brian d’Arcy James who recoils in horror as he learns just how close this threat is in his neighborhood. Ruffalo and McAdams have a wonderful scene where they discuss how the case is shaking them to their core, with McAdams listening intently, and reflecting on her inability to go to church with her grandmother anymore, afraid of how heartbroken she’ll be once the story is published. I believe the entire ensemble is award worthy, and it’s hard for me to single out any lone performance, but I think this scene nailed the Oscar nominations for McAdams and Ruffalo, in particular.

In smaller roles are John Slattery as a Globe managing editor, Liev Schreiber, an actor who can go wildly over-the-top forced to underplay to great effect here, as the new newspaper editor, Billy Crudup and Stanley Tucci as lawyers on opposite sides of the case, and Len Cariou as Cardinal Law, so unnerving and gentle in equal measure. Again, it’s hard to pick out a standout, as everyone here is turning in some great work. Accents are hard for some actors, but none of the ones heard here dip into cartoon-ish Bah-ston of dropped r’s and harsh consonants. It feels natural, and the flavor of the town is palpable.

If Spotlight has any problem, it’s in the nondescript direction. One could argue that Tom McCarthy was getting out of the way of the case, and refusing to sensationalize or somehow treat this material as salacious. This is true, Spotlight is very respectful and measured in its treatment of the facts, but one glance over McCarthy’s minuscule filmography and one can gleam no personal style. He’s a workman director, and he does fine work here, but his nomination seems more like overriding love for the movie than anything else. Oh well, there have been worse nominees (and winners) in Oscar’s past. If the movie’s overall flavor and tone is like a redux of All the President’s Men at times, hey, that’s not a bad movie to be compared to.