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You have probably heard by this time, the once-proud newspaper industry appears
to be in its death throes, a victim of changing times, evolving technologies and
accelerated news cycles. This is, of course, a shame for us all. With the
gradual end of newspapers as we know them, it also means a gradual end to the
newspaper movie as well. It's a genre that has provided us with some great
films. Whether they were broad comedies like "His Girl Friday" or "Continental
Divide" or classic dramas like "Zodiac" or, arguably the champ of the entire
subgenre, "All the President's Men".
However, if the newspaper movie has to go out--and while someone may one day
craft a compelling drama about a blogger doing their business, it really isn't
going to be the same--it may as well go out on a high note and that is what you
get with the powerful new drama "Spotlight." In chronicling the Pulitzer
Prize-winning investigation by the Boston Globe of pedophile priests in the
Catholic Church and the lengths that the Church went to in order to cover up the
frighteningly widespread scandals, the film eschews any numbers of opportunities
to milk the material for melodrama in order to provide both a rigorous
examination of the actual nuts and bolts of such a journalistic effort and an
elegy for a time when newspapers could actually make a difference to the lives
of their readers. While this low-key approach may not appeal to those hoping for
the usual Oscar-courting histrionics, those looking for a good story told in a
strong and sure manner will be rewarded with one of the best films of the year.
The film opens with a prologue set in 1976 in a Boston police station where a
Father John Geoghan is being held after being accused of molestation, only to be
set free in the dead of night with no publicity to speak of into the care of the
Archdiocese. When the story picks up again in July 2001, Geoghan now stands
accused of having molested over 80 boys but as awful as this sound, the news
only rates a couple of small stories in the Globe and nothing more--not
surprising in a town where the Catholic Church wields such power and where
members make up a large percentage of the subscriber base. Frankly, the writers
at the paper are more concerned about the arrival of newly-hired editor Marty
Baron (Liev Schreiber) and the cuts that might occur as a result. Surprisingly,
one of Baron's first moves is to turn the story over to the Spotlight section--a
long-form investigative unit headed by editor Walter Robinson (Michael Keaton)
and manned by crack reporters Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer
(Rachel McAdams) and Matt Carroll (Brian D'Arcy James)--in the hopes of bringing
new heat to the case and new attention to the paper in the community.
Each reporter pursues a separate line of inquiry. Rezendes is charged with
trying to get flamboyant lawyer Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci) to convince
some of the 86 Geoghan victims he is representing to talk and getting the courts
to unseal potentially damning documents that the Church has managed to keep
under wraps for years. Pfeiffer starts looking into molestation claims against
other local priests that would suggest that Geoghan was not simply the
proverbial bad apple and winds up butting heads with a slick local attorney,
Eric MacLeish (Billy Crudup), who has been involved with a number of clandestine
settlements between the Church and victims over the years. While poring through
official Archdiocese documents, Carroll figures out a way of determining when
troublesome priests were removed from their parishes, only to be sent to
"treatment centers" before being placed in a new parish with no mention of his
past misdeeds.
Eventually, their investigations suggest that at least 87 priests in the Boston
area may have sexually molested children and had their crimes buried by a
cover up extending all the way to the Vatican. With Baron and deputy managing
editor Ben Bradlee Jr. (John Slattery) carefully overseeing the proceedings, the
Spotlight team races to connect the last few dots and put together an airtight
story while trying to stay one step ahead of both rival newspapers, who could
blow their exclusive with one early story, and the Church, a far more powerful
and influential institution in the eyes of many Bostonians and one well-prepared
to go after the paper in the court of public opinion.
Obviously, the story at the heart of "Spotlight" could have been told in any
number of different ways. There could have been a version focusing on the
victims as they slowly come to terms with what happened to them while trying to
bring their tormentors to justice. There could have been a version focusing on
the Archdiocese and the lengths that they went to in order to cover up the
misdeeds of too many of their own. There could have been a legal-themed take
centering on Garabedian and his Herculean task of trying to take the Catholic
Church to court in a city as pro-Catholic as Boston. Any of these approaches
could have resulted in a potentially interesting movie but by focusing
exclusively on the journalistic investigation, the film allows us to touch on
all of those aspects without getting caught up in their potential clichés as
well--there are no scenes showing kids being victimized, no scenes of priests
gathering behind closed doors and no scenes of impassioned courtroom speeches.
Instead, we get to see all the little bits and pieces that would eventually come
together into the bigger and more horrifying picture--lots of chasing down
leads, digging through old files and the things that reporters used to do once
upon a time.
"Spotlight" was directed and co-written by Tom McCarthy, whose previous films
include such low-key winners as "The Station Agent," "The Visitor" and "Win
Win". The screenplay, which he co-wrote with Josh Singer, is a marvel of
screenwriting in the way that it takes an incredibly complex tale and pares it
down to its essentials without ever pulling punches or going off on unnecessary
dramatic tangents.
While the film obviously positions the journalists as the heroes of this story,
he takes pains to remind us that they too are imperfect by highlighting the fact
that their paper was just one of the many institutions that largely ignored the
scandal for years and tacitly allowed molestations to happen by not aggressively
reporting them, even when they had key evidence years earlier. The film also
resists the urge to "humanize" these characters by delving into their personal
lives for the most part--other than the occasional brief glimpse of one of them
at home, we only see them through their work and that is still enough to allow
their intelligence and humanity to shine through without underlining it for the
audience.
This is also McCarthy's most exciting work as a director to date. Working on a
much larger scale than his previous efforts, he keeps all of the myriad balls,
such as a large cast and a screenplay that could easily devolve into a confusing
mess with one misstep, in the air for the duration without dropping one along
the way. He keeps the film humming along at a solid pace without ever allowing
it to feel rushed. The cast--many of whom are veterans of the newspaper movie
genre (Keaton was in "The Paper," McAdams appeared in "State of Play" and Ruffalo, of course, was in "Zodiac")--is excellent across the board and sink so
deeply into their characters that they feel like real reporters and not like
actors playing dress-up. He also figures out a way to present the material in a
way so that there is a palpable sense of tension throughout even though everyone
going to see it most likely knows how the story eventually turned out even if
they are a little fuzzy on the details.
"Spotlight" is easily the best movie made about journalism since "Zodiac" and it
belongs on the short list of the great titles in the genre along with that one
and "All the President's Men." It is a smart and uncompromising look at how a
terrible story was finally brought to light by a group of professionals simply
doing their jobs and will leave you simultaneously outraged by the crimes and
the attendant cover ups and excited over the possibility that the victimizers may
at long last be getting the justice that they so richly deserve. It might even
inspire you to go out and do the unthinkable and buy a newspaper before it is
too late. Spotlight is one of the years very best films.
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