By Noel Vera
DVD Review
Spotlight
Directed by Tom McCarthy
There’s a point in Tom McCarthy’s new film where brand new Boston Globe editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) insists that the target isn’t a few bad priests, or even the powerful cardinal shielding said priests. “We’re going after the system,” he informs his newsmen. It’s one of the picture’s more quietly powerful moments in the way it yanks our viewpoint back, from considering the detailed process of writing a series of news articles to a broader perspective: exposure of both a venerable American city and an ancient multinational organization, caught in the act of close unholy collaboration.
I’d have called McCarthy’s Spotlight — about The Boston Globe’s eponymous special investigative team, and its years-in-the-making report on the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse cover-up — the most terrifying film of 2015, if it hadn’t been upstaged by another recent film telling of an even bigger horror story (Adam McKay’s adaptation of Michael Lewis’ The Big Short). The film is most affecting when it deals with those affected: when the victims are asked to re-live past traumas — in effect be violated again, sometimes digging up memories decades old — to uncover the truth. Their vignettes remind me of what made Up in the Air so memorable: the cumulative effect of people giving testimony, the resulting collage of eyes, faces, expressions, pain.
Sometimes the stories are as devastating as Joe Crowley’s (depicted onscreen with casual intensity by Michael Cyril Creighton), surrendering details of his first encounter with his abuser (and worse, what he thought and felt during, and after); sometimes it’s as quietly effective as SNAP leader Phil Saviano sitting down before the Spotlight team — as Neil Huff plays him Saviano initially comes off behaving like a crackpot, his casual revelation that he’s also a victim doing little to improve his credibility. Gradually the team (and we the audience) realize the truth in his words, and we’re stung by the memory of our earlier skepticism.
Of those trying to help, Stanley Tucci’s Mitchell Garabedian drops a picture in his jacket pocket and walks casually away. His victims’ lawyer has the seen-it-all heard-it-all weariness of a mountaineer perched on a peak, waiting for the Globe reporters to finally catch up (along with Mark Rylance’s ruefully pessimistic spy it’s possibly my favorite performance in a mainstream movie).
McCarthy has admitted in interviews that he had a story behind the story he wanted to tell, the continuing importance of journalism — a worthwhile cause the film champions as well as any recent picture. The film however is no All the President’s Men; Alan J. Pakula’s masterwork told a complex story with equivalent realism but far more compelling style. Unlike McCarthy, Pakula isn’t above delivering a thrill or two — shadowy meetings in underground garages, typewriters snapping out warnings under the blare of Vivaldi — but better than the noir touches were the suggestive ones: of Bernstein and Woodward toiling away at piles of papers, an overhead camera pulling back to reveal the immense space surrounding (actually the Library of Congress’ gigantic reading room): reveal in effect the relative insignificance, the utter hopelessness of their endeavor.
Spotlight covers too much territory to sketch much detail into its many characters (to be fair the most significant fact you can remember about the two reporters in All The President’s Men was that Woodward was the gentile) but it does pause to show however briefly the devastating effect the news has on the earnest faithful. How did the news affect my own faith? I see it this way: the Church is more than its priests or their superiors, is in fact composed of every believing member behind and before the altar. Not knowing has only poisoned that faith, eroded our trust, eaten away at our capacity to love the Church almost beyond the point of repair. The Boston Globe articles in early 2002 did much to draw out the venom — some of it anyway; everything that followed is what we might call the long painful process of healing. Which, I hope and suppose, is a good thing.
One more point: the film may not have told its story as well as the story deserves but the fact that it’s been told at all and on Metro Manila theater screens at that is something of a miracle. The last major film to deal with Church abuse — Stephen Frears’ Philomena (in my book a more openly dramatic more skillfully wrought more poignant work overall) — didn’t enjoy a local commercial run, and one is tempted to attribute this oversight to the stranglehold the Church has had on local media. In some ways times have changed (the new Pope took the effort to meet with Steve Coogan and Philomena Lee), in some ways not so much (abuse victim and critic Peter Saunders has recently been dismissed from the Church’s investigative body). The struggle continues.
THE DVD of Spotlight was launched in the US on Feb. 23.
