MOVIE REVIEW
“Spotlight”
Grade: A
Starring Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton and Rachel McAdams. Directed by Tom McCarthy.
Rated R for some language including sexual references. Check listings for theaters. 1 hours, 8 minutes.
Bottom line: A thrillingly good film about getting the story
Nothing in the superb new film “Spotlight” screams for attention. It’s an ordinary film in its technique, and it’s relentlessly beige. It avoids fist-pounding, crusading-reporter cliches almost entirely, the ones the movies have loved since the first close-up of the front page rolling off the presses in high-speed replicate. The story is a big one, and the movie about how a handful of Boston Globe investigative reporters got that story is thrillingly good.
Director and co-writer Tom McCarthy played a weasel of a journalist in “The Wire.” Now he has made a meticulous, exacting procedural on real-life journalists who excelled at their job; had the resources to do it properly; and in early 2002, published the first in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of grim, carefully detailed stories of pedophile priests. The most formidable institution in Boston preferred to keep the story from breaking. And they did, for decades.
“Spotlight” is no less concerned with the dynamic in any big city between the born-and-raised faction and the wary, mistrusted outsiders. There’s a moment in McCarthy’s film, co-written by Josh Singer, capturing this tension. It’s an arranged meeting called by Cardinal Law (Len Cariou), who has invited the Globe’s recently appointed editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) for a visit.
Here and there, the Globe wrote on accusations and settlements involving predatory sexual behavior within the Catholic Church, but for years did little. Baron nudges hometown born-and-raised editor Walter Robinson (Michael Keaton, great, easy screen company here), head of the Globe’s investigative team known as Spotlight, to look further.
As with so many movies, the trailer for “Spotlight” is a lie. It’s not a high-pressure movie. The script compresses and streamlines, but intelligently. There’s a particularly effective use of cross-cutting between Rezendes interviewing one victim, now grown, and Pfeiffer interviewing another in a different part of town.
Ruffalo gets top billing in the movie, and he brings some wonderfully lived-in behavioral details to his performance — the quick, terrier-like movements of the head and the bitten-off sentences. But Keaton’s Robinson, part of the Boston establishment, takes an increasingly prominent role in “Spotlight.” “Spotlight” is a masterpiece of ensemble tone.
The script has its overripe spots, when you sense McCarthy worrying and then suddenly overcompensating for the lack of histrionics. Ruffalo contends with a “It could’ve been you! It could’ve been me! It could’ve been any of us!” speech. He pulls it off, but barely. Composer Howard Shore probably needed one more insinuating piano theme on which to pull moody variations. There are moments of overstatement, and some drab staging. But it feels honest and earnest in all the right ways.
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