Five stars. Rated R, for profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.20.15
Crusading newspaper journalists
have been a cinema staple ever since the Ben Hecht/Charles MacArthur stage play The Front Page first hit the big screen in 1931, but true classics are rare.
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| The Devil is in the details: Michael (Mark Ruffalo, center) and Sacha (Rachel McAdams) grow increasingly excited — and horrified — as a fairly simple computer search by Matt (Brian d'Arcy) reveals that they're likely dealing with far more than just five or six pedophile priests. |
Meet John Doe, The Big
Carnival, Deadline USA and Absence of Malice come to mind, and they all
have one thing in common: They’re fictitious stories.
Memorable films based on actual
reporters who pursued real-world scoops are more scarce, in part because few
screenwriters can spin compelling drama from the day-after-grinding-day
research slog that precedes a “breaking” news story, which (to the outside
world) seems to come out of nowhere. The gold standard in this category remains All the President’s Men, in great part due to screenwriter William Goldman’s
superb, Oscar-winning adaptation of the Bob Woodward/Carl Bernstein book.
Goldman now has equally talented
company: Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer, who’ve done a masterful job with Spotlight — McCarthy also serving as director — and its depiction of the four
Boston Globe reporters who won a 2003 Pulitzer Prize for their astonishing
series of stories exposing the long-term cover-up of child abuse by members of
the Boston Catholic Church clergy.
As was the case with All the
President’s Men, Spotlight isn’t merely an engaging — even suspenseful —
drama, fueled by excellent performances from a well-selected ensemble cast;
it’s a valuable historical document that details a frankly heinous abuse of
trust and power. It’s simultaneously cathartic and horrific: a crisply
condensed depiction of an extremely complicated story that expands so far
beyond initial expectations, that — were it fiction — it likely wouldn’t be
believed.
But it’s not fiction; it’s grim,
infuriating and relentlessly heartbreaking fact.
Not to mention another reminder
of the significant service performed by newspapers and their dedicated staffs,
and the frankly alarming hole we’ll be in, as a country, if the Fourth Estate
is allowed to be replaced by the frivolous, empty-calorie content of “web
journalism” (an oxymoron if ever one existed).
McCarthy is an actor who burst on
the filmmaking scene when he wrote and directed 2003’s The Station Agent, one
of the finest, quirkiest dramedies of the new century. Singer has a wealth of
TV scripting credits in his still-brief career, notably The West Wing and Fringe, and he made the jump to movies with the 2013 Julian Assange
dramatization, The Fifth Estate.
Both McCarthy and Singer have an
ear for realistic dialog, and particularly the careful “dance” that takes place
during painfully raw and intimate conversations. This film is laden with such
scenes — some quite difficult to watch — and all handled masterfully both by
the film’s stars, and by lesser cast members appearing perhaps only briefly.
