Spotlight and Truth: American Indie Films Break down the News at Tiff

By Simon Houpt
Globe and Mail
September 10, 2015

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/awards-and-festivals/tiff/spotlight-and-truth-american-indie-films-break-down-the-news-at-tiff/article26313580/

Talk about kicking folks when they’re down. For the past decade or so, reporters and their ever-suffering bosses have had to come to terms with the fact that most people don’t seem to want to pay for journalism. And now comes word that people don’t even want to pay for movies about journalism.

In an interview at the Venice Film Festival last weekend, where Spotlight, his thrilling new film about The Boston Globe’s 2001 investigation into the Catholic Church’s sex-abuse scandal, had its world premiere prior to a bow at TIFF next Monday, director Tom McCarthy told the trade paper Variety that the film “kept falling apart,” as the producers tried to raise funds. “It was brutal,” he said. “It was dead three times.”

Through all the tumult of the Great Disruption that has laid waste to North America’s newsrooms, journalists have been able at least to draw some succour from movies that celebrated our life’s work, that made us out to be the heroes we are in our own minds: say, Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon; or last year’s well-received Rosewater, about the Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari. But, like newsrooms themselves, newsroom dramas rarely make money. If the genre dries up, how will we make ourselves feel better? Is there really that much Scotch in the world?

Spotlight is one of two American indie films about the news trade, both based on a true story, that are appearing at this year’s TIFF. The other, called simply Truth, is about television news rather than my ink-stained colleagues in the newspaper biz, and is therefore far more glamorous. Premiering Saturday afternoon, Truth stars Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes, the 60 Minutes producer who steered that program’s ill-fated 2004 report about George W. Bush’s questionable Vietnam War-era National Guard service. Robert Redford, who played Bob Woodward in the ur-journo-drama All the President’s Men, is Dan Rather, the veteran CBS Evening News anchor who retired in early 2005 amid a tsunami of criticism over the Bush report.

Based on a memoir by Mapes, Truth plays like an obituary, and not just for her career. Within hours of the Bush report airing, the conservative blogosphere, then ascendant, feasted on its perceived flaws; the criticisms were taken up and amplified by traditional outlets, including CBS’s ravenous rivals. Distracted by the noise amid the ever-quickening whiplash news cycle, voters quickly seemed to lose interest in the still-real questions about Bush.

In the film’s dying minutes, Rather reminiscences with Mapes that, once upon the time, “the news was a duty, it was a trust.” But when 60 Minutes became profitable, he says, everything changed. “It dawned on [the network] – ‘Well, how come the evening news isn’t a profit centre, too? Why aren’t the morning shows earning more? I mean, if you interview Survivor contestants instead of survivors of the genocide, your ad rates go up.’ Pretty soon, we won’t even run down our own stories, because it’s too expensive. We’ll just take someone else’s. Read them on the air for show.”

While Spotlight takes place at a similar inflection point for the industry – in 2001, cuts were coming down at the Boston Globe from its owners The New York Times Co. – it would like you to put the eulogy on hold and instead listen to the quietly urgent case it makes for the necessity of local newspapers. The film begins when Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) moves to Boston as the Globe’s new editor-in-chief and immediately starts pushing his investigative reporters to chase allegations of sex abuse among the Catholic clergy.

Baron is an outsider: a Florida-born transplant to a big city that has some tribal habits of a small town, a Jewish editor of a paper whose subscriber base is 53 per cent Catholic – and, as the publisher tells him, “You don’t necessarily want to piss them off.”

The tension between an outsider’s fresh perspective and the fierce filial loyalty of locals is threaded throughout Spotlight. When Cardinal Bernard Francis Law welcomes Baron to town with an offer of help – “I find this city flourishes when its great institutions work together,” he explains – Baron politely demurs: “Personally, I’m of the opinion that for a paper to best perform its function, it really needs to stand alone.” People frequently criticize news outlets for being too cozy with sources or the institutions they cover. And while that often is a problem, there are important nuances. In Spotlight, yes, it is Baron’s outsider’s eyes that prompt a new look at the church; but the story isn’t nailed down until a senior editor, who has lived in Boston all of his life, persuades an old school buddy to be a source.

The two stories at the centre of Truth and Spotlight are epic American tales of corruption that wouldn’t have come to light without professional journalists working the files. Are there similar stories just waiting to be uncovered up here, in Canada? Some have suggested we’ve actually been watching one play out all summer long; that L’Affaire Duffy could make for a fine All the Prime Minister’s Men. Canadians don’t often go to Canadian movies, but I have the feeling that one could be a hit.