It’s hard to say how much knowing what happens in a story affects our enjoyment of it. We live in the age of the spoilerphobe, where nerds like me abandon social media in the days leading up to a major release for fear of having significant plot points or major twists revealed too soon. But in Shakespeare’s day, everyone more or less knew the ending ahead of time, and the lack of novelty didn’t lessen the draw. That’s a reminder that what the story is need not, and arguably should not, overshadow how the story is told.
Which is to say, I’m not sure how much the greater effect of Spotlight was lost on me given that I already knew a decent amount about the molestation scandal within the Catholic Church that played out in the newspapers and on our television screens for years after the time depicted in the film. The movie is, if not exactly a mystery, then certainly a story of the intrepid reporters of the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” team starting a small investigation and slowly but surely uncovering how widespread a pathology there was.
Much of the film is framed as the Spotlight team investigating something seemingly isolated and being shocked to find how far the tendrils stretch out, reaching areas and individuals they never would have expected. But the impact of this gradual discovery is blunted when you already know how deep the rabbit hole goes. Sure, there’s something to the characters’ realizations that tries to drive the magnitude of the discovery home, but as horrible as what they uncover is, the film loses some of its narrative punch when its big developments are telling you something you already know.
Which is why the film’s most vivid and poignant scenes are those involving the Spotlight team interviewing the victims of the abuse. There’s a stark quality to these sequences, which feature straightforward but moving recountings of how these men were taken advantage of as boys, that make them stand out. The film as a whole has a Wire-esque sparseness in the production design and cinematography that makes these scenes, and the horrors they represent, more palpable, awful, and affecting.
The scenes with the survivors were the best and most affecting in the film.
But they also reveal a difficult hurdle for the film — the story of what happened is more striking than the story of the people who found out what happened. But that’s a sprawling, very individual story, splintered across thousands of victims and abusers, leaving director/co-writer Tom McCarthy to focus on the newspaper investigation in an attempt to tie it all together. The unfortunate side effect is that this mediates the terrible events that the film is concerned with, mixing them up with didactic discussions of psychological pathology and the personal effect that learning all of this has on the reporters who discover what happened.
There’s a fair attempt made both to educate about this crisis and to bring its wide-ranging impact home by showing how it affects Mike Rezendes’s (Mark Ruffalo) connection to his faith, or Sacha Pfeiffer’s (Rachel McAdams) relationship with her grandmother, or Matt Carroll’s (Brian d’Arcy James) sense of the safety of his children in his neighborhood. And yet even as the film is about the Catholic Church’s molestation scandal, at a broader level it’s just as much about the way that communities close ranks in the face of a potential crisis, and in how there’s a certain complicity to it, a sometimes unconscious acceptance of how things are that invites horrific actions to be swept under the rug.
A laudable performance from Michael Keaton as Spotlight editor Walter Robinson anchors the latter theme in the film. As Robinson hunts down old leads and sources, he encounters resistance from well-meaning fellow journalists who believe the story was culled from the crank file, less-than-subtle suggestions from friends and community leaders who urge him not to rock the boat for the good of the city, and disdain from veteran soldiers in the fight to expose the abuse who chastise him, and by extension The Boston Globe, for not doing more and not doing it earlier. Carpetbagging editor-in-chief Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber, who makes a strong impression with a textured performance in a smaller role), represents the way an outsider can cut through the status quo and see the collective shame for what it is without the history in the community or the stomach to ignore it.
It's a far cry from his role in 1994's Mixed Nuts.
It’s legitimate material to explore in a film of this sort, and yet it ultimately feels very paint-by-numbers in the attempt. Spotlight has all the trapping of the prestige picture. It hits on a Big Issue; it features palatable protagonists fighting against something abhorrent; and it boasts an impressive cast who are given more than enough room to underline the film’s major points. Every scene seems to end with a line or an exchange that ties a very obvious bow on whatever the audience has just witnessed. Ruffalo gets his Oscar reel moment to bang on the table and demand justice. And the end of the film features the predictable moment of self-questioning, the inevitable bit of triumph, and the white text on a black background explaining the real life consequences of the “Based on True Events” story the viewer has just witnessed.
That means that the film gets every opportunity to make its statements, to throw in standard-if-creditable character moments, and to work in small but salient details of the scandal. It fails, however, to make this all feel like something other than a movie going through the motions in the lead up to the Academy Awards. The film has something to say, and it’s worth saying, but it doesn’t delve particularly deep into these ideas and doesn’t offer anything especially novel or creative in how it presents them either.
Spotlight is a good enough film. It has a sturdy structure, quality acting across the board, and locks in on some worthwhile thematic material. It’s not a movie I’m sorry to have watched, but it’s also not a movie I’m likely to ever watch again, because even if I haven’t seen this exact film before, I’ve seen this type of film 100 times before. It’s a solid take on the “dogged reporter breaking a scandal” story, and it hits all the right notes for an Oscar hopeful. But Spotlight never goes a step beyond that commendable-yet-spiritless flavor to the proceedings that seems to persist through so many movies in the same vein.
