Spotlight, the Catholic Sex-abuse Drama, Is a Worst-to-first Triumph

By Scott Tobias
GQ
September 17, 2015

http://www.gq.com/story/tom-mccarthy-spotlight-toronto-international-film-festival

In the 16 years I've been attending the Toronto International Film Festival, Tom McCarthy's The Cobbler may be the single worst movie I've seen here. And during that time, I'm typically seeing four or five movies a day over seven to ten days, so conservatively speaking, I've seen somewhere around 500 movies. Many of them are terrible: Bloated awards-trawlers, impenetrable navel-gazers, "discoveries" by first-time/last-time directors, and those random slot-fillers that yield a masterpiece two percent of the time and a dud the other ninety-eight. But The Cobbler was a special kind of misfire, a magical realist comedy featuring unsettling racial overtones, Adam Sandler at his most clinically depressed, and a shocking series of third-act misjudgments.

As I wrote at the time, "The Cobbler is a paradox: A film that must be seen to be believe, but mustn't be seen." One year later, however, McCarthy is back with Spotlight, a gripping account of the Boston Globe's comprehensive investigation of child sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church, and among people who report on Best Picture frontrunners, it has been declared the Best Picture frontrunner. As worst-to-first comebacks go, pick your analogy: The 1991 Minnesota Twins, '80s Neil Young to '90s Neil Young, 1941 to Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's tempting to say that The Cobbler is the sort of terrible movie that only a great director could make, but McCarthy isn't some cinematic visionary. His other films—The Station Agent, The Visitor, and Win Win—are all small-scale, accessible, meat-and-potatoes dramas that rely on well-honed performances and empathetic storytelling. With The Cobbler, he made the mistake of trying to sing in a higher octave.

Spotlight plays to his strengths. As scripted by McCarthy and Josh Singer, the film succeeds first and foremost in bringing order to an extremely complex piece of team reporting. The "Spotlight" team of investigative journalists at the Globe—played here by Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, and Brian d'Arcy James—are not merely compiling cases of abuse within the Church, but working to expose a cover-up that goes all the way to Cardinal Law and beyond. And they're doing it in a tribalist city where the Church wields influence over every institution, including the newspaper, which can ill-afford to alienate its Catholic subscriber base. The reporting had to be methodical and the assertions bulletproof—otherwise, the paper would be buried in hate mail and lawsuits at a time when the entire industry was starting to slip.

The obvious precedent for Spotlight—both as a movie and as a culturally relevant Oscar contender—is All the President's Men, but while McCarthy falls short of that standard in dread-soaked atmosphere, he proves to be an ace reporter in his own right. Spotlight is a J-school crash course in working a story, from collecting testimonials to sorting through documents to assembling the puzzle pieces that complete the larger picture. It also goes deep into the Boston-specific politics that make challenging the Church so difficult and the legal system that aided the cover-up. And for as much as the film hails the virtues of the Fourth Estate, it accounts for why reporters at the Globe failed to follow through on the widespread abuse happening right under their noses.

McCarthy comes to filmmaking from the acting world—he played the reporter who makes up a serial killer story in The Wire's fifth season, and "Dr. Bob" in Meet the Parents—and he excels at serving the entire ensemble without letting the story go slack. Nothing is forced here: There are revelations that shock and move and anger these reporters, but he allows those moments to play out without wedging in any big, self-righteous, Newsroom speeches. Ruffalo is the standout, with an open wound of a performance that recalls his breakthrough in You Can Count on Me, but equally kind things could be said of Liev Schreiber's reserve as the Globe's quietly persistent new editor-in-chief or Stanley Tucci as a lawyer for abuse victims whose amusing cantankerousness masks a well of compassion.

There are parallels, too, between the insularity of the Catholics in Spotlight and the gangsters in Black Mass, the Whitey Bulger biopic that addresses how Bulger's operation was as protected as Cardinal Law's.

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Spotlight comes out of TIFF looking especially good, thanks to two lesser premieres inadvertently making the case for it. The equally star-studded Truth is a serviceable account of the 60 Minutes report on George W. Bush's National Guard service that backfired on Dan Rather (Robert Redford) and his producer, Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett), and led to their ouster from CBS. Writer-director James Vanderbilt (Zodiac) identifies the election-year politics that caused this flawed story to unravel so dramatically, but the speechifying, the ghastly score, and the slow-clap ending embrace all the journo-movie cliches that McCarthy so studiously avoids. No one needs a full-throated lesson in corporate journalism from Topher Grace.

There are parallels, too, between the insularity of Boston Roman Catholics in Spotlight and the Southie gangsters in Black Mass, a Whitey Bulger biopic that addresses the question of how Bulger's operation was as protected as Cardinal Law's. As Bulger, Johnny Depp doesn't entirely lose the alien qualities of his later performances, but he's a model of restraint next to actors like Joel Edgerton and Benedict Cumberbatch, two non-Americans who appear to have picked up their Boston accents from Mayor Quimby on The Simpsons. An argument could be made that Southies serves a particularly thick bowl of chowdah, but it contributes to the impression that Black Mass is a period dress-up piece that expresses a city's divisions no more subtly than The Warriors.

With Spotlight, McCarthy and his cast turn the volume way down—not to the point where the regional accents aren't there, but to a scale more suited to a credible docudrama. They've made a film about the virtues of good journalism and they've made a film about a Boston ruled by a unique and punishing social order. And they've done it better than anyone.