VENICE
The Hollywood Reporter
The Bottom Line
An explosive topic gets a prosaic treatment.
Venue
Venice Film Festival
Opens
November 6 (Open Road)
Cast
Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, John Slattery
Director
Tom McCarthy
Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams play Boston Globe reporters trying to expose a cover-up of sexually abusive priests in Tom McCarthy’s fact-based drama.
A would-be All the Cardinal’s Men, the less-than-resonantly titled Spotlight makes a dry affair of the sensational story of a small circle of Boston Globe journalists who, more than a decade ago, exposed the Roman Catholic church’s institutional protection of sexually abusive priests. As numerous notable films have demonstrated, the spectacle of lowly scribes bringing down the great and powerful can make for exciting, agitating cinema, but director and co-writer Tom McCarthy’s fifth feature is populated with one-dimensional characters enacting a connect-the-dots screenplay quite devoid of life’s, or melodrama’s, juices, which are what distantly motivate this story in the first place. Virtuous only by nature of its subject matter, this Open Road release, set to open in November, might have been more at home on the small screen.
It was a very big deal indeed when the church was finally called to account for its history of looking the other way or quietly shuffling misbehaving clergy off to obscure parishes when caught with their robes up or pants down. It was virtually unthinkable to the city’s fifty percent Catholic population that the trail would lead all the way to the Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Law, who resigned in 2002 when faced with numerous irrefutable first-hand testimonies.
To tell the story, McCarthy and co-writer Josh Singer (the dreary The Fifth Estate) focus on the small investigative “Spotlight” team of Globe reporters, who routinely worked on stories for months and wouldn’t give up on this one until their chain of evidence was complete and unbreakable. Unfortunately, the filmmakers don’t make them interesting and distinctive people, and the uniformly excellent actors playing them can’t bring them to life all by themselves. The truly dramatic story here lies off-screen and to a great degree in the past, while the journalists’ work consists mostly of persistence, constant grinding and not having a life until the job is done. (And maybe not even then.)
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