Spotlight: My Good, Bad, and Ugly

Rating: 9/10 (10 June 2019)

The Good:
Spotlight excellently sets the stage for the shocking stories that the quartet of Boston Globe reporters sometimes seem only to stumble into. As the film unfolds, the world around them foreshadows both the giant revelations that they uncover, and the sweeping network of moral horrors perpetrated by The Catholic Church in Boston. A character goes so far even to point out a church, and playground, in the background as he tells the story of his repeated molestations as a child and how that further confused his already delicate sense of sexuality. In that moment, while unnecessarily obvious, The Church's stranglehold of a city and its people is made clear so in every other sequence the hidden symbolism of the same becomes more ominous and slowly bubbles to the surface as the moment of The Globe's publication approaches.
The Bad:
The film is unnecessarily preachy at times. Each principal actor is given a moment where they expound on the grave moral compromises made by those involved both inside and outside the Church. The film assumes an audience that's unaware of the controversy that The Boston Globe helped to uncover, or that has already sided with the film's antagonist. To combat the naïveté or predeterminations of that assumed audience the film gives us lapsed Catholics outraged as they realize the scope of what the priests of their community have been doing for decades. The outrage on its own is to be expected given the subject matter, but when the script explicitly calls attention to it, it does a disservice to its audience by not allowing it to come to those same conclusions naturally through the investigations and exposés built into the narrative.
The Ugly:
Spotlight superbly re-introduces the potential of journalism ride-along films. A genre best introduced by All the President's Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976). Like Spotlight, Pakula's film elaborates on a recent controversy by chronicling the actions of investigative journalists and their editors that stumble upon the greatest contemporary scandal of modern America. Rather than telling the story of Watergate and the ensuing scandal, the audience uncovers the truth through an interrogation of the facts much like Woodward and Bernstein did throughout 1972 and 1973. Most significantly this film does the job of retelling the investigative uncovering of a major scandal better than its 2015 counterpart chiefly by refraining from any opinionated commentary. The audience of the day understood the gravity of the scandal having experienced it in real-time only three years prior - much like Spotlight - and the filmmakers understood their responsibility to present a narrative grounded in the truth without a diegetic commentary that would push an individual interpretation one way or another regarding the consequences of Watergate.