UNITED STATES
Entertainment Weekly
BY JOE MCGOVERN
For all the severity of its subject matter, Tom McCarthy’s extraordinary journalism drama Spotlight (in theaters now) is not a movie of noble gestures and emotive Oscar-bait moments. And the performance which best encapsulates the film’s unassuming, non-vainglorious, worker-bee approach to its story is Liev Schreiber’s as the Boston Globe’s editor-in-chief Marty Baron, who pressed his paper to fully investigate the colossal cover-up in Boston of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church.
Spotlight has been compared favorably — and justifiably — to the gold standard in journalism movies, 1976’s seminal All the President’s Men. According to that point of analogy, Schreiber’s top boss role is similar to Jason Robards Oscar-winning part as the saucy, colorful Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. But Baron, who left the Boston Globe in 2012 and incidentally now runs the Washington Post, is a quieter and more reticent personality, especially for a newsman. Having arrived from his previous job at the Miami Herald as the film begins, Baron is viewed with suspicion by most of his staff — and the good ol’ boy Irish Catholic culture.
Schreiber’s acting in the film is a masterpiece of tranquility. The penetrating screen presence which the actor has brought to dozens of roles during his 20 year film and TV career — including The Daytrippers, The Sum of All Fears, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and Ray Donovan, not to mention his Tony-winning work on stage — has been fascinatingly coiled in Spotlight into a stealth tiger of a man, whose calmness betrays his deep ethical conviction. Baron, ultimately, is the truest hero of the movie. And Schreiber, for the miraculously ego-less way in which he communicates that, gives what just might just be the most nuanced, subtly commanding performance of his life.
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