Shining a Spotlight on the power of investigative journalism and the horrors of humanity.
By Josh Lasser
If the film Truth, which was released earlier this year, is all about our nation’s journalism going wrong and about corporations not supporting those who research and develop stories, Spotlight is the exact opposite. Rather than being the funhouse mirror version of Woodward and Bernstein, it something much more in the original mold and almost every bit as powerful.
Directed by Tom McCarthy, Spotlight is about the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team and the story they put together in 2001—just a couple of years before Truth takes place—on the child molestation horrors within the Roman Catholic Church. It is a movie as eye-opening as the revelations were when the Globe first reported on them.
Over the course of the two-plus hours, McCarthy delves into how Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton) and his four-person team at the Globe—Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), and Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James)—brought the story to light. It focuses on the running down of leads, slowly combing through stacks upon stacks of research, and piecing together the investigative article bit by bit.
In the hands of someone else, it could prove a slow and tedious affair. Spotlight is not that. It is a crackling movie, carefully mixing in the Catholic Church story with the tale of who these journalists are and what is going on in the world at large. Newspapers cutting back, the September 11th tragedy, the nature of Boston as well as its inhabitants, and the judicial process all figure into the goings on.
We want to hear it.
One of the most incredible things about Spotlight is that it manages to balance all of these things without ever losing track of the fact that at its core it must be about those who were abused. As the journalists do their job, there are repeated scenes where they encounter victims, and each of these individual tales remain as powerful as the one which came before. They never feel over the top or unnecessary, each is relevant. Not a moment in Spotlight feels extraneous despite its runtime.
The audience gets to see how each of the reporters on the core team, others at the paper, and residents of the city, are hit by the gravity and scope of the investigation. Robinson, Pfeiffer, Rezendes, and Carroll all find themselves dealing with personal issues as a result of the case, but Spotlight manages to make that happen in a way that feels right and natural, never as though the complications are artificial ones orchestrated in order to create a more involved film.
The team of actors assembled for the movie—the rest of the cast includes Liev Schreiber, Billy Crudup, Stanley Tucci, John Slattery, Len Cariou, Paul Guilfoyle and more—is outstanding. Virtually every actor offers a nuanced performance in a movie which could easily find the audience losing track of who is who for the sheer number of folks involved. Everyone is differentiated and makes their mark. Consequently, even when an actor only pops up a couple of times over the course of the movie, they are instantly recognizable to the audience, and the film can continue its story without losing a beat.
If there exists a standout in the cast, it is Ruffalo as Rezendes, who finds himself doing most of the courthouse legwork. For much of the movie Ruffalo offers the sense of being as tightly wound as a spring and always on the verge of snapping. There is a tension to him as he deals with his personal problems and manages them alongside the building of the report that is captured every time he’s on screen and makes each scene with him that much more powerful. This may make it sound like a take on Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner, but watching Spotlight, the Hulk will be the furthest thing from one’s mind. Visually, of course, the actor is recognizable, but he feels like a completely different person in the way he speaks, the way he carries himself, the way he approaches a problem.
Spotlight is about the power of investigative journalism, about the good that it can do, but it is also quite clearly about the evil that men—and institutions—can do. The movie lays the responsibility for the abuse of so many children at the feet of the Roman Catholic Church in general and the Archdiocese of Boston in particular. It does this without failing to point out that had any one of a number of groups, including the Globe, acted differently the problem could have been brought to light much earlier and many children could have been saved.
