A Spotlight on Spotlight: A Movie to See

A Spotlight on Spotlight: A Movie to See November 29, 2015

Spotlight

Yesterday afternoon Jan and I went to see ‘Spotlight.’ What can I say? Ann Hornaday, writing for the Washington Post asserts how “It’s not a stretch to suggest that ‘Spotlight’ is the finest newspaper movie of its era, joining ‘Citizen Kane’ and ‘All the President’s Men’ in the pantheon of classics of the genre.” I think she says it true.

The film follows the action as the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team, what Wikipedia informs me is “the oldest continuously operating newspaper investigative unit in the United States” pursues a pattern not only of sexual abuse of children within the Catholic Archdiocese, but an ongoing conspiracy to cover this up, protecting the perpetrators rather than the children victims and their families.

Rotten Tomatoes audience scores it at a whopping 97%. The professional reviewers give it one more point, at 98%. The site’s consensus summary tells us “Spotlight gracefully handles the lurid details of its fact-based story while resisting the temptation to lionize its heroes, resulting in a drama that honors the audience as well as its real-life subjects.”

Peter Travers’ “Rolling Stone” review of the film starts off “There’s no higher compliment to pay this steadily riveting, quietly devastating take on investigative journalism than to say ‘Spotlight’ gets it right.” The film was directed by Tom McCarthy. Travers goes on to say of the script written by McCarthy & Josh Singer, “There’s not an ounce of Hollywood bullshit in it.”

The film has a wonderful cast. Michael Keaton plays ‘Spotlight’ editor Walter ‘Robby’ Robinson. And for his team Michael Rezendez as Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams as Sacha Pfiffer (whom I listened to as NPR’s local host for All Things Considered during many a drive between Providence and Boston) and Brian d’Arcy as Matt Carroll.

The film delicately balances the need for holding up the crimes and the victims, while focusing on the newsroom investigation. I was impressed with the selection of people to portray the adult survivors of the abuse, particularly Neal Huff’s Phil Saviano, who led a virtual one-man campaign to expose what had happened, possibly to the point of madness. And, I was particularly moved by Michael Cyril Creighton’s, Joe Crowley, deeply wounded but also very much taking his recovery into his own hands.

Others to note are Liev Schreiber as Marty Baron, the top editor brought in from outside, and who first suspects there is a conspiracy to investigate, and who constantly pushed the team to go deeper. The real life Baron proved a worthy successor to the mantle held by Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee of Watergate fame, and in the film with that additional sweetly ironic connection with John Slattery’s portrayal of Ben Bradlee Jr, the deputy managing editor at the paper, whose steady and cautious hand helped make sure the Spotlight team dotted their “i’s” and crossed their “t’s.” Also a special shout out to Stanley Tucci’s Mitchell Garabedian, an attorney who had been pursuing what seemed a Quixotic campaign against the Catholic hierarchy in a sewed up Catholic town, that is, up until the Spotlight team got on the job.

Rik Kisonak writing for Film Threat says, “The filmmakers and cast are careful to focus on the drudgery, dead ends and shoe leather that go into an enterprise of this scale, eschewing sensationalism. Of the film’s 128 minutes, not one is wasted on self-righteous grandstanding or speech making.”

Among the things that caught me were how this was a movie about shoe leather, and more, actually, about libraries. I felt that scene in the Boston Public Library’s reading room competes with the parking garage in All the President’s Men for dramatic effect. I loved the menacing background music as the Spotlight team poured over page after page, seeking the damming evidence. While there may have been more actual physical fear in Watergate, the depths of the good old boy system that made any progress a walk through molasses was deliciously supported by Howard Shore’s scoring.

In the last analysis, I think this is mostly a film about newspapers, and our need for journalism even in this era where the print medium is endangered, and at the dawn of some new era that at this moment we barely can discern. Something we need to be aware of. Something we need to be worried about.

A lovely film. I found it deeply moving.

Go see it. You won’t be disappointed.


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