THE most low-key of this year’s Academy Award Best Picture nominees is also, in some respects, the most dramatic.
There is little of the explosive energy that Hollywood has taught us to expect from newspaper offices: no fists slammed into tables...
It is 2001, and the new editor of the Boston Globe, Marty Baron (Schreiber), orders the Spotlight investigation team to look into a seemingly isolated case of clerical child abuse. Team leader Walter Robinson (Keaton) doesn’t think the story will go anywhere, but feels unable to refuse, particularly as Baron has a reputation for cutting staff. So he and his colleagues get to work pulling files and setting up interviews. The early leads – including a scrappy lawyer and a crankish, letter-writing survivor – don’t look too promising, but it isn’t long before the evidence starts to accumulate, not only of widespread abuse but also of a systematic effort to conceal it. One priest becomes thirteen; thirteen becomes almost ninety. And soon it begins to look like every major institution in the city of Boston is somehow complicit in the conspiracy of silence, up to and including the Globe itself.
Spotlight opens with the familiar phrase ‘based on actual events’, and for once this feels like an understatement. Writer-director Tom McCarthy – best known, ironically, for playing a highly unethical journalist in the final season of The Wire – has crafted a restrained but compelling account of the Spotlight team’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation, one that manages to tell a sensational story without ever stooping to sensationalism. There is little of the explosive energy that Hollywood has taught us to expect from newspaper offices: no fists slammed into tables, no thunderous clashes with the higher ups. Nor are there any late-night breakthroughs or dazzling leaps of intuition. In fact you could almost accuse the film of making the investigation look too straightforward: in scene after scene the journalists ask for something – a list of guilty priests, access to sensitive files, confirmation from an inside source – and are promptly given it. But then that seems to be the point. The story is right there under the surface; all it takes to uncover it is the willingness to do so, plus an occasional montage of Excel spreadsheets.
Of the team’s personal lives we see very little. Sacha Pfeiffer (McAdams) has a devoutly Catholic grandmother she goes to church with on Sundays. Michael Rezendes (Ruffalo) is separated from his wife and boils hotdogs for dinner in a semi-furnished apartment. With the exception of a couple of scenes towards the end of the movie, we don’t really get a sense of how they feel about going up against one of the world’s oldest and most powerful institutions – or even about child abuse for that matter. The focus remains squarely on the investigation itself, and this approach, which could almost be seen as an evasion, actually works to the film’s favour. Rather than putting monsters on screen and having the heroes cathartically destroy them, Spotlight leaves them out altogether. The film has its villains, of course; it’s just that they’re all in the real world.
The starry cast is appropriately low-key, with only Ruffalo standing out – for better or worse – by virtue of his bristling energy and hunched, almost simian posture. He also delivers the closest thing the film has to a soapbox speech, though this brief outburst, featured prominently in the trailer, is as much a cry of professional frustration as it is a tirade against injustice. Rarely are big-screen adaptations of real-life scandals so self-possessed. But then outrage, for all its thrilling noisiness, is a short-lived emotion. Spotlight aspires to something more enduring. Like Alex Gibney’s recent Scientology documentary, Going Clear, it tells you a real-life horror story you thought you already knew but really didn’t. The first thing to appear after the screen fades to black is a list of cities where major clerical child-abuse scandals have occurred. You’ll find yourself keeping an eye out for your own.
Spotlight is showing in cinemas nationwide.
