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