One of the best movies of the year and arguably the best journalism film of all time.
Spotlight
Grade: A
Director: Tom McCarthy (The Station Agent)
Screenplay: McCarthy, Josh Singer (The Fifth Estate)
Cast: Mark Ruffalo (Foxcatcher), Michael Keaton (Birdman)
Rating: R
Runtime: 128 min.
by John DeSando
“This is Boston.” Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci)
As an Armenian attorney, Garabedian knows what it’s like to fight the city of Boston, synonymous with Boston’s powerful Catholic Church. Moreover, he’s saying this to a reporter of Portuguese descent, Mike Rezendas (Mark Ruffalo). These two outsiders and new editor Marty Baron (Lieve Schreiber) are the lethal combination for an investigation at the turn of this century of Catholic priests’ child abuse in the diocese and by extension, the world.
Spotlight, a title referring to the name of the special Boston Globe long-term investigative team, is as much a thriller as a docudrama. To watch these professional journalists develop the case against the pedophiles and the church hierarchy is to see more clearly the mistakes made by the broadcast journalists of Truth, which chronicles the sourcing of the story about then President Bush’s military performance.
Dan Rather and his team would have done well to learn from the Globe reporters’ dogged pursuit of sources, with supporting evidence against more than 70 priests. With the year’s most under acting but most universally great acing, Spotlight is a delight to see. The dialogue, of which the film is mostly composed, by director Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer, is full of smart observations and an energy that keeps the film moving at a pace commensurate with the rapid unfolding of the investigation.
One of the film’s strengths is its unwillingness to overplay its points. Because the Globe had this crime information 20 years before and buried it in the Metro section, the case has been unfolding glacially, and the film respects the slow pace of the disclosure by providing no smoking gun or moment of epiphany—just clues strewn in its own paper ages ago. Reclaiming those stories and adding to them are the basis for the case against the Church, best represented by Archbishop Law, who notoriously reassigned his errant priests when they were caught.
Spotlight will have an Oscar spotlight if only for the best ensemble of the year together with unparalleled spot-on writing. Enjoy.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
