Monthly Archives: February 2016

  • Spotlight

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tom McCarthy (2015)

    Spotlight is straightforward and unsurprising, in terms of how it looks and in terms of what happens in it.  This is the dramatised account of a real-life investigation, by the Boston Globe’s ‘Spotlight’ team, into allegations of child sex abuse by Roman Catholic clergy in the Boston archdiocese over a period of decades.  The more the Spotlight journalists dig around, the more they find.  Their initial focus is on a single priest; by the time the Globe starts to publish their findings, in early 2002, the list of offending clergy numbers eighty-seven.  The plain look of Spotlight is by design:  Tom McCarthy has said in interview that he wanted the story he’s telling to speak for itself, without the help – or the distraction – of visual fireworks.  (The obliging DoP and editor are Masa Takayanagi and Tom McArdle respectively.)

    The personal lives of the four members of the Spotlight team aren’t allowed to intrude much either.  We see the increasing strains placed on the friendship of Walter ‘Robby’ Robinson (Michael Keaton), the senior member of the team, with longstanding buddies whose connections to the Catholic Church are stronger than his – but we see nothing of Robby’s own home life.  Like him, all his three Spotlight colleagues were raised Catholics.  Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) and Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) are both lapsed.  Mike hasn’t the time for churchgoing:  he’s such a workaholic that he’s separated from his wife and holed up in a grotty rented apartment.  Sacha occasionally accompanies her grandmother to mass until she’s too appalled by the fruits of the Spotlight investigation to set foot inside a Catholic church.  The fourth member of the team, Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James), although he now worships with his Presbyterian wife, has to deal with the implications of the scandal uncomfortably close to home:  one of the priests under Spotlight scrutiny lives just a block away from Matt, his wife and their kids.  Late on in the movie, Robby Robinson has to confess to colleagues that he didn’t follow up on a list of twenty paedophile priests sent to the Globe the best part of ten years ago by a lawyer called Eric MacLeish, with whom the Spotlight team has had various encounters in the course of the narrative.  Tom McCarthy’s staging of this scene avoids melodramatic irony.   The director’s disciplined style is reflected too in interviews conducted by the journalists with now-adult victims of abuse.  These sequences are naturally distressing but not overdone.

    This low-key treatment – in combination with its subject – makes Spotlight a distinctive film.  The well-organised screenplay, which McCarthy wrote with Josh Singer, supplies a detailed description of how the Boston Globe gathered evidence.  The nature of that evidence and the accompanying, accumulating proofs of effective teamwork and tireless legwork ensure that the picture succeeds as a paean to investigative journalism, and in making clear the systemic nature of the scandal and the cover-up by senior churchmen that the Spotlight team exposes.  The national and international extent of child sex abuse by Catholic clergy is conveyed simply by legends at the end of the film but the list of places where this has now come to light, elsewhere in America and throughout the world, is shockingly lengthy.  (It makes considerably more impression than the run-through at the close of Suffragette of where and when women got the vote.)  But there are limitations to McCarthy’s approach.  This movie truly is a procedural.  If it’s not fair to say that Spotlight is no more than a dramatised documentary, this is only because of the quality of the acting and McCarthy’s skilled orchestration of it.

    Besides, McCarthy feels compelled to dramatise – or, at least, dynamise – the material to some degree, and in familiar ways.   Even allowing for his being a keen jogger with an appetite for the truth, there’s more than enough of Mike Rezendes racing through streets and wolfing fast food fast.  Sacha Pfeiffer scribbles in her notepad at demonic speed.  We expect the journalists in a high-stakes newspaper drama to remind each other repeatedly of the moral significance of what they’re doing.  This happens rarely in Spotlight yet, when Mike impassionedly speaks his mind – disagreeing with Robby about when the story should go to press – his words are nonetheless leaden.  They have the sound of Tom McCarthy observing a formal requirement of the genre.  It might seem refreshing that none of the protagonists is a fervent practising Catholic whose faith in the Church stands ready to be destroyed.  But the fact that the scandal isn’t personally world-shattering to any of the protagonists also makes for a lack of penetration in the drama.  When Mike eventually confides to Sacha that, until he discovered what was going on in the archdiocese, he’d always assumed he’d one day return to the Catholic fold, this revelation too feels purely mechanical.

    Neither of these moments is as awkward as it should be, thanks to Mark Ruffalo.  It’ll be clear from the above that he has to shoulder much of the generic load of Spotlight.  He does it with characteristic resourcefulness and charm.  Ruffalo brings a valuable humour to proceedings, especially in early scenes – as when smart, eager, gauche Mike Rezendes first visits Mitchell Garabedian, a lawyer who represents some of the abuse victims.  Michael Keaton’s sustained underplaying of Robby Robinson is admirable but has the effect of underlining the dramatic consequences of McCarthy’s method:  Robby, who seems meant to be the central consciousness (and conscience) of the story, remains opaque.  Brian d’Arcy James does well as Matt Carroll and Rachel McAdams, as Sacha Pfeiffer, the best work I’ve so far seen from her.  Liev Schreiber is excellent as the Boston Globe‘s new editor, Marty Baron, the Jewish outsider to a Catholic stronghold, whose quietly firm directive triggers the Spotlight team’s investigation.  Schreiber brilliantly combines unease and determination – as the newcomer chairing his first editorial team meeting, in Baron’s interviews with the newpaper’s publisher and the egregious Cardinal Law (Len Cariou).  Schreiber is expressive in these exchanges not only in his face and voice but even in the way he sits on a sofa.  Late on, he does well to hint that Marty Baron is almost scared by the magnitude of the story he’s now got on his hands.

    The relatively weak link in the Globe office is John Slattery as Ben Bradlee Jr – he’s OK but not inside the character the way that the others are.  It may not help that Slattery is playing someone with a famous name.  (You keep expecting Ben Bradlee Jr’s colleagues to compare the scandal being uncovered by the Spotlight team with the Washington Post classic overseen by Bradlee’s father.)  All the actors evidently love their fast-talking interactions in the office, for which they’ve been supplied with good dialogue by Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer.  The film is very well cast and the lawyers are particularly strong.  Garabedian is played by Stanley Tucci with trenchant wit and angry style.  Billy Crudup convinces as the ambiguous Eric MacLeish.  Jamey Sheridan is superb as Jim Sullivan, Robby’s golf partner and the archdiocese’s attorney.  Paul Guilfoyle is scarcely less good in the role of another lay representative of the Church’s interests.  (Both Sheridan and Guilfoyle have great faces.)

    The Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigation was rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize in 2003; Tom McCarthy’s film is also winning plaudits and awards.  McCarthy does a good job of realising textures of office life in the early years of the twenty-first century and the movie is surprisingly interesting as a period piece.  There are allusions to the internet but it’s not the constant reference point that it’s since become; overall, this tribute to investigative journalism has a somewhat elegiac flavour.  It’s striking too to see Boston, which has become so well known in recent years as the epicentre of gangland America on screen, as a focal point for a very different kind of organised crime.  The film lasts 130 minutes and they whizz by compared with the passage of time in The Hateful Eight or The Revenant or even The Big Short.   Spotlight is a decent film in both senses of the word yet I also found it disappointing.  It’s a reminder that the acting in American pictures is as good as ever but it’s also a very pronounced case of a cast giving substance to thin characters.  I was too aware throughout that what kept me engaged in the story – as a drama rather than as a matter of historical fact – was acting sleight of hand.

    3 February 2016

  • Eat Pray Love

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ryan Murphy (2010)

    In the middle of the way and about halfway through the film, the heroine Liz Gilbert (Julia Roberts) has taken up residence in an ashram in India. At this point, Richard Jenkins, playing another visitor to the community, a Texan (also called Richard), shatters the torpor of the flaccid, complacent travelogue that is Eat Pray Love.  Jenkins isn’t the kind of actor you would usually think of as explosive.  He looks ordinary; his special gift is to illuminate ordinariness – he’s like a quieter Gene Hackman.  The genius of Hackman and Jenkins is to inhabit their roles so completely and compellingly that you never think, while you’re watching, that they’re playing supposedly ‘ordinary’ people.  They’re too gripping for the thought to cross your mind.  In spite of his subtlety, you always notice Richard Jenkins.  (When I watched There’s Something About Mary a few weeks ago, I was sure it was Jenkins in a vivid cameo as a psychiatrist but I couldn’t see his name in the cast list so thought I must be wrong.  Now I see from his filmography that it was him – in an uncredited appearance.)  Jenkins has the face and the skill to suggest, as soon as he appears on screen, a man who’s lived a life rather than an actor who’s arrived on set.  Here, it’s soon clear that religious devotion hasn’t dulled Richard the Texan’s wits but you can also see in the eyes behind protective-looking spectacles that he’s a long way off the inner peace that he’s in the ashram trying to cultivate and recommending to others.  Liz accuses him of talking ‘in bumper stickers’ and he almost aggressively agrees.  The sequence in which Richard explains the personal tragedy that brought him to the ashram is, in terms of the build-up and its placing, a dramatic cliché but Jenkins’s execution of it is riveting, alchemical.  His is the best acting I’ve seen in a new film this year.

    Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 memoir Eat Pray Love is hugely popular.  According to Wikipedia, it had at July 2010 spent 180 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list – and it may not be fair to assume that this adaptation, with a screenplay by Ryan Murphy and Jennifer Salt, accurately reflects the book.  But the ‘journey’ the film describes comes over as a carefully and cannily pre-planned route to personal enlightenment (also according to Wikipedia, Gilbert ‘financed her world travel for the book with a substantial publisher’s advance’).   Liz, after walking out on her marriage to Steven, a man who wants her to be as boring as he is, has a short-lived affair with David, a young actor who’s into Hindu meditation, and then decides she needs to go on a voyage of self-discovery, taking in Italy, India and Bali, in that order.  In Rome she will eat:  it seems hard to believe she can’t find decent pizza and pasta in New York but, a well-travelled journalist, she already has the idea that Italian cuisine reflects a joie de vivre she’s lost in her American life.   In India, she’ll spend time at the ashram where David’s guru is based.  In Bali, she’ll go back to a wise old man she recently interviewed there.

    The structured scope of Liz’s quest is highly prescribed.   You might think, for example, that Italy offered facilities for prayer and love-making but Liz’s stay there must be entirely food-oriented.  Stage 1 will indulge her appetite.  Stage 2 will be all spirituality.  Stage 3 will allow Liz to achieve a ‘balance’ between the first two preoccupations.  She knows where’s she going and the itinerary is designed to provide a big romantic finale as well as allow Liz to discover the meaning of life.  The three imperatives of the title are so clearly distinguished that the beginning of Liz’s sojourn in a new location seems to involve getting out of her system the dominant element of the previous one:  when she first arrives in the ashram, she can’t stop eating. (The visual transitions from one country to another are relatively graceful.)

    If you haven’t read the book, there’s no reason to care about Elizabeth Gilbert, except that she’s played by Julia Roberts, who does just enough to remind you she’s a good actress as well as a star.  Roberts’s face is becoming more remarkable as she gets older (she’s forty-three this month) and its beauty isn’t comfortable.  You’re more aware of the bones and the lack of flesh gives Roberts’s mile-wide smile a rictus quality.  The star presence seems intensified and exposed – it might be threatening if Eat Pray Love were less bland.  As it is, Roberts’s potential to intimidate remains potential here.  The movie’s blandness is frustrating – I eventually got the impression Roberts was frustrated too.  There’s an engineered crisis in Liz’s romance with Felipe, the Brazilian she meets in Bali, that’s meant to give a bit of suspense to the last part of the film ahead of the inevitable happy ending.  (It doesn’t.)  Roberts’s anger at this point is too much – she seems to be expelling tensions that aren’t part of the character but which have built up in the actress during the languorous course of the movie.  But there are also more positive sides to Julia Roberts’s maintaining her human dimension.  She retains some of the qualities that made her popular in the first place:  twenty years on from Pretty Woman, she still has a great laugh that still sounds spontaneous – in spite of the self-centredness of this material, Roberts herself doesn’t come over as egocentric.  Because she looks extraordinary but also seems down to earth, audiences like as well as admire her.  Although I drowsed from the start of Eat Pray Love and several times told myself there wasn’t a good reason for trying to stay awake, watching Roberts in a film as poor and overlong as this one – in which she’s in nearly every scene and where the woman she’s playing is of very little interest – reminds you how much you take for granted a star’s ability to hold your attention.

    I was mostly relieved that the serious truths imparted in voiceover by Liz were restricted to the very beginning and end of the story but, with only these bookends, it’s hard to understand why anyone might regard Eat Pray Love as intellectually engaging.  In spite of the material’s pretensions to spiritual profundity, Eat Pray Love is consistently shallow.  We seem meant to be amused that the biggest crisis encountered by Liz and her dull Swedish friend Sofi (Tuva Novotny) in Rome is that, after weeks of overeating, they’re getting spare tyres (known here as ‘muffin tops’).  There’s a gruesome ‘comical’ montage of their trying on new pairs of very tight jeans (and of course Julia Roberts doesn’t look to have put on an ounce).  It might seem easy at least to make all that Italian food look mouth-watering but the shots come across like a series of commercials – miserably weak compared with the sequence in I Am Love in which Tilda Swinton makes love to a prawn.

    The opportunities for frothy fun in the ashram are comparatively few – Ryan Murphy has to rely on the decorative splendours of a marriage ceremony to keep things looking luscious.  In each of the Eternal City, Eternal India and the Balinese paradise-on-earth, there’s a fair amount of broad comic characterisation of the locals (nuns eating gelato in Rome, yattering street vendors in India, the cute geriatric purveyor of ancient wisdom in Bali).  Only the vistas, shot by Robert Richardson, seem meant to be genuinely breathtaking yet they’re somehow vacuously beautiful.  There’s an unbelievably ropy flashback to Liz’s wedding to Steven:  she says they married too young but they look the same age in the flashback as they did at the other end of their unhappy life together.  As the husband, Billy Crudup does an amusing tense dance at the wedding reception when the couple discover the band aren’t playing their song – it’s not surprising, given the crudeness of the role, that he seems even more tense the rest of the time.

    The waste of good actors is prodigious.  Javier Bardem has the humour and confidence to give some emotional substance to the role of Felipe, who takes over Liz’s life in Bali, although the development of their romance is mechanical.  I’m pleased that Viola Davis’s deserved success in Doubt has yielded what’s presumably a bigger payday here and, considering the feebleness of what she has to do as Liz’s best friend in New York (Liz is terrifyingly organised:  she has a best friend – just the one – in every port of a call), Davis shows commendable wit.  But she’s wasted.  So is James Franco as the young actor David.  Franco seems sleepy and subdued although he’s such a taking actor that you keep thinking he’s going to do something interesting with the character.  And he has a kind of believability, in spite of the falsity of the conception he’s playing.  There are some less well-known people in smaller parts who emerge with credit and who would be worth seeing again in less crummy roles – Christine Hakim (the Bali best friend), Luca Argentero (Sofi’s Italian boyfriend) and David Lyons (an Australian beaut).  Sophie Thompson is a woman in the ashram who’s taken a vow of silence.  You end up wishing it had lasted longer than it does.

    Eat Pray Love can make you feel there must be more to life than spending 140 minutes of it watching films like this.  The consolation is that the gorgeous emptiness of the film makes it easier for a genuine article in it to have impact.   In Saint Joan, the characters argue about whether Joan is a miracle-worker or a charlatan and the archbishop says:

    ‘A miracle is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles. Frauds deceive. An event which creates faith does not deceive: therefore it is not a fraud, but a miracle.’

    A piece of acting like Richard Jenkins’s in Eat Pray Love reassures me that I didn’t waste my time going to see the film and reminds me that real crap can contain real artistry.  Eat Pray Love may be a fraud but Richard Jenkins’s acting creates faith.  It’s a miracle.

    2 October 2010

     

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