Spotlight

#24 in my ranking of Best Picture winners at the Oscars.

There’s a subgenre of films about working professionals doing their jobs professionally that I admire quite a bit. They tend to be quieter, less melodramatic, and with more restrained performances that allow for subtler and deeper emotions to seep into the audience, and Spotlight is just that sort of film (well, except for Mark Ruffalo). It tells a highly emotional story in restrained terms that don’t force emotions upon its viewing public, ending up with a deeply penetrating look at the abuse of power by the Catholic Church in Boston.

In the build up to John Geoghan’s trial for sexual molestation, The Boston Globe receives a new editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), a Jewish man direct from another newspaper in Miami, who talks to the editor of the Globe’s deep investigatory unit, the titular Spotlight, Robby Robinson (Michael Keaton), who tells him that the sealed documents in the Geoghan case should be Spotlight’s next focus. On a certain level, it’s obvious that Baron doesn’t quite understand the hornet’s nest he’s going to kick up by asking for the unsealed documents, but it’s obvious that he also doesn’t care. There’s a story there, and that’s the job of a newspaper, to find a story. So, much to Ben Bradlee Jr.’s (John Slattery) exasperated resignation, Robby gets his team, Michael Rezendez (Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), and Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James), to start digging.

The first place to go is the lawyer representing Geoghan’s victims, Mitch Garabedian (Stanley Tucci), someone with a reputation of a crackpot (with the hair to match), but who is a cleareyed man with a focus only on helping his clients, dismissing Rezendez because he doesn’t have time for one time reports, especially when he’s already talked (this becomes a running motif). Sacha and Matt focus on tracking down the victims themselves, mostly filtered through Phil Savino (Neal Huff), leader of a non-profit for survivors called SNAP who hands them a box of materials he insists he sent to the Globe several years previously, and the Globe did nothing with it. At the same time, Sacha and Robbie visit Eric MacLeish (Billy Crudup), a high-powered lawyer with a history of helping represent victims but remains tightly bound by ethical rules to prevent him from talking in too much detail.

This is a lot of pieces, but it’s just that kind of film. There is a lot of ground to cover, and the film balances those mechanics of a large plot that involves legal machinery and events that are never recreated, only spoken of, with enough small character moments for our protagonists to actually feel like real people, like Sacha, a lapsed Catholic, taking her grandmother to church, or Matt discovering a dark secret about a house down the street and leaving notes on his refrigerator warning his kids to stay away. Rezendez, though, only lives for work (there is talk of a wife he’s on a break from), and Ruffalo plays him super-intensely. I find it hilarious that he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor because he feels so out of place. Everyone else is professional and collected, and every scene Ruffalo is in it feels like he’s about to pop his top. I don’t think he’s very good in this.

The team figures out new ways to attack the central question, always pushed quietly by Baron to expand the scope of the issue to get as big a picture as possible, and they discover that Geoghan is only a drop in the bucket of the Archdiocese of Boston, leading to dozens of potential predatory priests (their initial numbers go to 87 and their reporting beyond that gets them to 70 of those 87). In between all of this are interviews with more victims, like Joe Crowley (Michael Cyril Creighton) who describes how he was groomed by Father Shanley. The very straightforward approach to the telling, just letting the character speak through the events, is really effective without becoming exploitative like a recreation would have (aside from the fact that anything we see in a film we’re more likely to believe automatically).

It’s the story of a steady climb over a mountain of filth in an effort to expose a terrible practice and the terrible administration of Cardinal Law (Len Cariou) who decided that the best thing to do was to shuffle these problem priests from one parish to another every couple of years, a practice used for decades and brought to light by the hard reporting of the Spotlight team. And yet…as Robbie says in a late scene, none of this information was new (well, some of it, like the sealed documents). They had all the pieces. They ran little stories in the Metro section about it every few years, not finding the editorial excuse to pursue the stories any further until an outside came in and told them to do it. Rezendez insists that the story needed Spotlight, the dedicated investigatory team, but, Robby reminds him, Spotlight started in 1970, thirty years prior.

The cast is uniformly good (except Ruffalo whom I think I may just not like very much), but I think it’s Stanley Tucci who is the unsung hero of the cast. His role as Garabedian is not the biggest, but he’s so smart in his delivery, almost witty as he lays out tricks of the law (his description of how he got sealed documents into the public is weirdly compelling) all with this combination of detachment and deep earnestness, a cynic who’s been fighting a losing battle for so long that he can’t see victory only the drudgery of the battle ahead, is delivered with such precise care by Tucci that I think he’s the best single element on screen.

But this is really an ensemble picture, which is why Ruffalo’s performance doesn’t bother me that much regarding the whole film. It all collects together into this incredibly compelling package, a look at professionals doing their job while uncovering a horror underneath society. It’s great.

Rating: 4/4