Review: Spotlight

Based on a true story from the early 00s, Liev Schrieber is Marty Baron, the new editor-in-chief at the Boston Globe. Boston has a predominantly Catholic community, and Baron wants to tackle a story about a Boston priest accused of molestation several times, and somehow still managing to keep serving as a priest. For this he gathers the tight-knit investigative team known as ‘Spotlight’: Editor Walter Robinson (Michael Keaton), and reporters Sacha Pfeifer (Rachel McAdams), Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), and Matt Carroll (Brian d'Arcy James). Once they start digging, they uncover a shockingly mammoth amount of wrongdoing by priests, and an equally shocking amount of cover-up by the Church. John Slattery plays managing editor Ben Bradlee Jr., Stanley Tucci plays an attorney named Mitchell Garabedian representing a group of victims, Billy Crudup plays a lawyer involved in the abuse cases who seems to be settling an awful lot, while Len Cariou plays the powerful Cardinal Law, and Paul Guilfoyle and Jamey Sheridan play a couple of Church-connected friends of Robinson’s who urge him to back away from the story.

 

Impeccably well-acted 2015 drama from director Tom McCarthy (who the same year unleashed whatever the fuck “The Cobbler” was meant to be) and his co-writer Josh Singer (“The Fifth Estate”) just can’t compete with the similar but far superior documentary on pretty much this same subject, “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God”. If you’ve seen that shattering, fascinating film, this can’t help but feel a fair bit lesser, despite the best of intentions and a lot of hard work from one and all. There’s also quite a bit of “All the President’s Men” to the journalism scenes, and not just because one of the characters is Ben Bradlee Jr., son of the character Jason Robards (Jr.) played in “All the President’s Men”. An uncredited Richard Jenkins, for instance, pretty much functions as ‘Deep Throat’. With the cast and subject matter, I thought this one was going to be a winner, but it just didn’t quite grip me like I was expecting. The acting registers much more strongly than the characters, and the message is worthier than the film. Still, it’s not boring, and it will absolutely have you fuming throughout. There’s a truly disgusting statistic revealed at the end that made me want to smash my fist into a wall or something. If you’re a Catholic, you should be so incredibly pissed off with your own clergy. It’s seriously messed up in terms of priorities.

 

Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, and Liev Schreiber are all very solid in the more important roles. Ruffalo got Oscar nominated for one scene (and you can’t tell me that’s not true), but is still very good throughout. He’s certainly more impressive than the actual Oscar winner that year, Mark Rylance in “Bridge of Spies”. Keaton is one of my favourite actors, and it’s great to see him in some good films these days doing worthy work, after seemingly disappearing for a while there. He’s a little more sedate these days, whilst Ruffalo probably has the role Keaton would’ve played say 25 years or so ago. However, I was actually more impressed by the smaller performances by character actors Stanley Tucci (who can’t do a Boston accent but can play Stanley Tucci better than anyone), Len Cariou (perfectly cast as Cardinal Law), Paul Guilfoyle, Billy Crudup (so good with little screen time), and Jamey Sheridan. They’re certainly all far more impressive than Rachel McAdams who yes, is present during the film’s most jaw-dropping scene (one that has a similar counterpart in “Silence in the House of God”, actually), but has a pretty reactionary role otherwise. I really like her and keep waiting for her to get a great role and run away with it, here she nabbed an Oscar nomination for…being in a movie with a bunch of really great actors doing great work around her. That was a strange decision by the Academy, though unlike Kim Basinger in “L.A. Confidential” at least she didn’t actually win an Oscar for it. I will say that she and the other actors playing the reporters and staff all convince as a well-oiled team, however. Liev Schreiber actually plays the most interesting character in the film and gives the film its one fairly original wrinkle. In addition to being Jewish, this guy’s also an out-of-towner newly brought to the paper, and he’s not a baseball fan. In Boston. At least the reporters who work for him can claim to be lapsed Catholics and/or baseball fans. And obviously a Boston newspaper taking on the issue of paedophilia in the Catholic church is going to be one hell of a David vs. Goliath battle.

 

This is a great issue, but not a great film. Watch “All the President’s Men” and “Silence in the House of God”, instead. Neither the best nor worst Best Picture Oscar winner, it’s well-acted by everyone and it’s nowhere near a failure like “The Cobbler”. It’s a soft recommendation perhaps, when there’s clearly better works on similar subjects out there.

 

Rating: B-