Spotlight

Spotlight explores how in 2002 the Boston Globe's "Spotlight" team, the country’s oldest newspaper investigative unit, broke two enormous stories: The widespread sexual abuse of children by priests in Massachusetts, and the Boston archdiocese’s systematic cover-up that allowed that abuse to continue. The Spotlight team is portrayed by Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, and Brian d'Arcy James, with John Slattery and Liev Schreiber as their editorial supervisors. This flawless cast embodies the actual men and women who brought to light the long-buried history of childhood sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and who won the Globe a Pulitzer Prize for their work. By sticking close to the facts and exploring the daily grind, frequent disappointments, and political complexities of covering a major story in a major city, the movie demonstrates the vital role newspapers still play in our society.   

But this is not a pretentious or sanctimonious depiction of a noble but undervalued and rapidly disappearing profession. Nor is it one of those simplistically drawn docudramas that cherry-picks a string of facts then arranges and fictionalizes them to put across a narrow perspective or agenda. Unlike the recent, unforgivably titled movie Truth, about the 60 Minutes story that led to the firing of Dan Rather and producer Mary Mapes, Spotlight does not paint its journalist protagonists as heroes or martyrs. These characters are simply human beings doing a job. They are very good at their job, but they have flaws and biases, internal conflicts, and uncontained emotions.  They, like the people they cover, are guilty of mistakes that they would just as soon not dwell on or discuss.

Writer/director Tom McCarthy and his co-writer Josh Singer contain the complex story by focusing their narrative on the four members of the Spotlight team, a few of their colleagues, and a small handful of their interview subjects. Thus, rather than a rushed or overwritten film with dozens of thinly drawn caricatures (so common in docudramas like Fair Game, Kill the Messenger, and Foxcatcher—to name just three recent examples), we get scene after brilliantly written scene of the journalists working, digging, strategizing, finding the right people to talk to, and then talking frankly with them. It’s a procedural whose outcome is already known to most of us, yet it’s absolutely riveting. McCarthy and Singer don’t base their original screenplay on someone’s memoir or some preexisting book by an author who did all the research for them. For this reason, their movie towers above most “based on actual events” pictures—because it actually feels like an authentic investigation of recent history, rather than a simple recreation of it.

Aside from the all-star cast portraying the Globe journalists (along with Stanley Tucci and Billy Crudup who play lawyers that factor largely in the investigation), the sizable ensemble is not populated with famous faces. Celebrity casting is another common mistake of docudramas, whose filmmakers justify their many cameos with the false notion that it is the only way audiences can remember minor but important characters. In Spotlight each individual feels real and is therefore memorable and easy to keep straight, and all the real-life roles seem to be portrayed by just the right individual. The relatively unknown actors who portray the survivors of abuse bring humble, unflashy credibility to these roles that would be difficult for movie-stars to achieve. Since this is a story about real trauma that happened to real people, many of whom did not survive it, the treatment of these characters is critical. They never come across as mere narrative necessities used to get the story from one point to the next, nor do they ever feel like two-dimensional spokespeople for a specific political slant, ideology, or aspect of the larger issues this film touches on. They just seem like people. And they inject the scenes of the Globe reporters learning about the extent of the abuse with just the right amount of anger, sadness, and insight.

The calm, controlled ensemble acting, combined with the taut writing and editing, create a prolonged tension throughout the picture. McCarthy gives each interaction—be it friendly or foreboding, uninhibited or standoffish—a tangible intensity. Without overloading us with information, we experience the ins and outs of long-form investigative journalism and see close up why it takes so much time, why it’s difficult and expensive to do, and why it can feel like so many forces are pitted against the accomplishing of the goal. Most of these forces are not sinister. They’re part of human nature or inherent in the situation. People don’t trust the press; rival papers can scoop the story and ruin delicate investigations (either intentionally or unintentionally); and the lengthy process of confirming the import and range of a story takes the painstaking due-diligence of experienced professionals who know the right places to look, the right questions to ask, and the right people to seek out for verification. Getting the story isn’t the most important part of the job. Making sure the story is unimpeachable is every bit as critical, and that’s where the hard work lies. At a time when contemporary culture seems only to trust inexperienced “outsiders,” this film’s theme of why professionals matter is every bit as important as is its message about why newspapers still matter.

Spotlight’s best feature is that there are no simplistically drawn villains. We see almost nothing of the predatory pedophile priests investigated by the team. We don’t need to see them. Their lack of representation on screen makes them all the more shadowy and elusive. We do see Boston Archbishop Cardinal Bernard Law (played by Canadian stage actor Len Cariou), who becomes the eventual target of the Spotlight investigation. But he is not depicted as an evil puppet master. Rather he is presented as the representative of an institution that wields tremendous power and influence over every aspect of the city—so much seemingly absolute power that it’s been absolutely corrupted. Law could easily have been made into a mustache-twirling bad guy since he was the indisputable reprobate at the head of the priest abuse problem in this particular city. But Spotlight goes out of its way to cast wider, more diffuse illumination of the degrees of culpability we all have in situations like this.

There are degrees of guilt to be sure, but a cover-up of such scale succeeds only if the vast majority of a population helps perpetuate it. This film takes everyone to task, whether they actively worked towards (and benefited from) suppressing victim’s voices and keeping people in the dark, or if they kept silent because of laziness, fear, misplaced trust, or an unwillingness to confront painful truths. The depiction of Eric MacLeish, a prosecutor who settled dozens of cases against the Archdiocese, is a prime example of Spotlight’s refusal to take narrative shortcuts to achieve superficial audience reactions.  The filmmakers could have easily reduced this small role to that of a heartless, money-grubbing lawyer, but McCarthy and Singer brilliantly use the arc of this character’s small handful of scenes to force the finger of blame away from a straw man we can all feel good about hating, and back onto the larger society.

Spotlight may not prove as timeless as All the President's Men, still the gold standard for cinematic depictions of journalism (and one of my 100 favorite films). McCarthy’s movie lacks the visual elegance and film noir mystery elements of that monumental picture, directed by Alan J. Pakula. And, though Boston infuses every aspect of Spotlight, the city never becomes a character in the film the way Washington D.C. does in All the President’s Men. McCarthy and director of photography Masanobu Takayanagi (Silver Linings Playbook, Out of the Furnace, True Story) shoot in a simple, unadorned style, which is totally appropriate for this movie’s straightforward approach on all fronts. But, despite its tension, Spotlight never gets under our skin to the point where it can cinematically convey actual feelings to the audience, the way Pakula and cinematographer Gordon Willis visually induce a palpable sense of fear and paranoia in viewers of All the President’s Men.  Spotlight’s generic, one-word moniker also lacks the poetry of a classic title that will live on in our memories forever.

Nonetheless, McCarthy and his editor Tom McArdle should be lauded and rewarded for making what I can only imagine will stand as the best picture of 2015. Up to this point, these filmmakers have made small, personal, independent films like The Station Agent, Win Win, and the near-perfect The Visitor—all compact character-based stories that illuminated grand themes like friendship, loss, grief, loneliness, the meaning of family, and the consequences of American immigration policy.  Spotlight is the first high-profile picture for McCarthy, and what makes it work so well is that he’s treated this great big story no differently than his previous three little ones. Spotlight never grandstands. It eschews the extraneous romantic or familial subplots that supposedly “humanize” real-life characters. And it doesn’t provide its actors (apart from one unfortunate shouting fit from Ruffalo) with the type of showboating scenes we can never imagine happening in reality, but we can certainly picture getting played over and over at awards ceremonies. Spotlight avoids all these pitfalls. It is an important story told with impeccable professionalism, just like its subject.