Spotlight Review: Sometimes Journalists Can Be Superheroes ~ Cinenus

Open Road FIlms

It’s easy to become jaded about tales of tenacious journalists, and the film has to be pretty special to cut through the well-worn conventions that have shaped these works for years. The ink-stained fingers of the diligent reporter is hardly the natural stuff of drama, yet when one includes power, politics, and religion, we can get the likes of All The President’s Men to pique our interest.

Sometimes reporting matters. Sometimes it can help change the world for the better. The work in the early 2000s by the investigative arm of the Boston Globe newspaper managed to do just that.

Spotlight is the name of that branch, a small cubby of a space set apart from the bustling newsroom. Their job is to dig deep, to spend months (or years) delving into the intricacy of a story. When a new editor shows up, the first question he asks his staff is to look into allegations made by some about sexual abuse by priests, and the systematic cover-up by the Catholic church of this fact.

The film does well to make the investigation seem suspenseful even if anyone paying any attention the news over the last decade and a half knows the outcome. What we get to see isn’t simply the results but the process, the nitty gritty nature of real reporting, delving into microfiche and other clippings, seeking out the needle from a very large haystack indeed.

For the sake of a film with a beginning, middle and end things sometimes get a bit askew. There’s only so many ways to make the waiting for court documents cinematically engaging, and Mark Ruffalo’s manic performance may be the best shot at having an audience care. Michael Keaton, as head of the unit, plays manager to his capable ballteam, taking meetings with the inside men of Boston and finding his way to the heart of the conspiracy. Rachel McAdams stays dogged, John Statterly stays dashing, Brian d’Arcy James frets about his neighbors and both Stanley Tucci and Billy Crudup make fine lawyers.

It’s Liev Schreiber’s role as editor Marty Baron that’s likely to get the least amount of attention, yet I was strangely captivated by his nebbishy turn. It’s likely the least Schreiber-y take he’s done in a while, and that might be part of the pleasure seeing him play taciturn but intensely cerebral and competent as the quietly muckraking man in charge.

Director Thomas McCarthy is no stranger to procedurals or media stories done right (lest we forget his acting involvement in The Wire, Goodnight, and Good Luck, or the criminally underappreciated Syriana). Nor of course should we forget (or forgive) the poisonous dreck of The Cobbler, a movie so egregious it wasn’t even mentioned at the festival crowd as having played in the same venue a year earlier. The jump in quality between productions is to be applauded, and if the film may not quite warrant unabashed praise, it’s certainly a good enough palate cleanser from what came before.

So we have in the end a film that’s at times quite riveting and engaging, tackling a topic of great social importance, and doing so in a way that’s complicated without being convoluted. This is the stuff of awards fodder, and while that might put off some of the more jaded of cinephiles it’s no reason to dismiss the work as mere Oscar bait. You’ve got a story worth telling and one told well, and that’s to be admired.

The film even touches on other, unresolved issues – the paper, for one, had all the information at hand but never connected the dots, an echo of the other catastrophic event that took place in 2001 and curtailed the investigation briefly. We get a sense that the papers were still vibrant back then, but there’s an undercurrent of changing times, both in terms of ownership consolidation and the spectre of impending layoffs. Plus there’s the “world wide web” provided as a novelty during a homily, a sly nod to the real challenges to the economic model that would allow such an ersatz group unbridled time to dig in and uncover the truth.

In days of crowdsourcing, aggregation and listicles, it’s humbling to think that a near-past still had some of that old school, down and dirty reportage that’s the stuff of legend. The film provides a celebration of these activities of the journalists, showcases the braveness of the survivors, and does so without entirely making it a witch hunt that simplifies the story for sake of easy digestion.

Spotlight is ambitious and powerful, and well perhaps not as luminous as one may long for, it’s about as great as a dramatic film of this ilk, on this storyline, is likely to be.

The Upside: Terrific performances; engaging and powerful story; lets a bunch superheroes play journalists for a change.

The Downside: At times needlessly amped up; $83 for photocopying?!

grade_a_minus