script and performances is all, and that's enough

Rating: 10/10 (7 December 2015)

With a movie like Spotlight, the one thing you can say against it is that it's not particularly showy. We won't remember the movie this year let alone years from now for its cinematography (though perhaps its lack of being 'showy' or really darkly lit or stark in contrasts is its own visual statement). This isn't to say that Tom McCarthy doesn't so his job as a director in an elemental sense; he does get some good shots (there's one where the camera simply backs up as a crucial statistic is laid out by the ex-priest turned therapist who gives the Spotlight reporters what they need to move forward into the bigger picture of their story, and it works beautifully). But what he does is put together the best cast possible - Keaton, Ruffalo, John Slattery (as Ben Bradley Jr, which I'll touch on in a moment), Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, Stanley Tucci, Billy Crudup, and even Richard Jenkins as the voice on the phone - and makes sure that they're all on a level where no one ever upstages another. The story is all here.
It's a subject that carries with it some exposition - you got to know the facts of this case, and there are times you get a lot of information, not unlike say Law & Order SVU - but it's all in service of a narrative that makes it welcome and exciting. This is about what it means to craft a story and to get it right, but what 'right' even means in the grand scheme of things, which here being the sort of Court of Public Opinion. If you don't get the facts right, or have enough 'deep cover' to back things up, things can be poked through, especially in the context of this story being in Boston and the Catholic church. While pederasty wasn't unheard of in 2001 with the priests and organization in general, it was seen as more-so isolated incidents. The key to Spotlight being so compelling is to draw the viewer in the same way the reporters do: the stakes here are so high.
It's easy to compare this to All the President's Men for a number of reasons; one thing I saw as an interesting coincidence was two generations of Ben Bradleys here, with Robards as the Senior in 'Presidents' at the Washington Post and the Junior played by a no-BS Slattery, similar level of sarcasm in the midst of professional talk by the way. What it comes down to is how much do performances and the search for information against a super-powerful institution (one the branches of government and conspiracy of the Executive level, the other an institution that "thinks in centuries" as notes in the film) elevate the material? I think just as with the Pakula film, this does it exceptionally well. While it may not have the same sort of effect of that 76 film (no Gordon Willis, as I said it's not a particularly stand-out film as far as the look), Spotlight really has some deep things to address about faith and trust, and it doesn't shy away from making these reporters real people in the midst of their search.
Ruffalo and Keaton may stand out the most for people, chiefly as they get (I think, I could be wrong) more impactful screen time as they are each looking for precious information (the former with his connection to Tucci's lawyer, who handles cases involving pedophilia and the church and in the screwed up legal system, the latter with the 'source' he has and his own background growing up in Boston and the Church). But I was very impressed by the screen time being evenly laid out; Ruffalo and Keaton may get the Oscar attention, but Schreiber has a number of remarkable scenes, such as an awkward/polite conversation with Cardinal Law, and McAdams as she knocks on doors and has the most startling scene involving a conversation with a priest who reveals, remarkably, candidly, that he didn't really see what he did as rape (he should know, he says, as he was raped).
If you like seeing a cast keeping things grounded and realistic, and yet have moments of powerful drama and conflict that cuts at a lot of corners of society (especially, also, involving class as this is also a class issue involving low-income families having kids who were molested/raped), this is a film to see. It doesn't exactly leave you feeling all that 'good', but it does celebrate what journalism can do in an unfussy, unsentimental way that is refreshing too.