The widespread horrific nature of the hidden abuse within the catholic church is the sort of thing that baffles you still today when we try and comprehend how such unfiltered and brutal abuse could have occurred against children and with allowance and help from the Archdiocese. The breaking of this story was helped desperately so by the work of the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe newspaper, this eventually would become the focus of the 2015 Best Picture winner of the same name. Spotlight is one of very few films to win Best Picture and only win one other award at the Oscars, in this case Best Original Screenplay. Of the films nominated that year, Spotlight would certainly be my choice for Best Picture (if any of Carol, Steve Jobs or 45 Years were nominated, it might be a different story). For me Spotlight’s biggest strength was the key focus for its director Tom McCarthy, to not get in the way of the story being told. Spotlight is solely there to serve its story and portray the struggle of the survivors, aswell as the immense work of the newspaper team that broke the story. In many ways the exact factors that made Spotlight so terrifically successful are the exact factors that have made it particularly unmemorable to certain people. Not me however, for I feel that Spotlight may very well be one of the most underrated Best Picture winners of all time.
Tom McCarthy, the film’s director noted a whole range of films as influences for the film ranging from films clearly influencing the realistic depiction of a newsroom, such as Broadcast News, Network and Good Night, and Good Luck. Along with more films that put us in the world of a news industry tackling powers beyond them, such as The Insider, All the President’s Men and Frost/Nixon. However perhaps the most obvious and clearest influence on Spotlight would be Sidney Lumet’s masterpiece 80’s court drama The Verdict, which is a film about many things, but eventually reveals itself to be chiefly about the immense power of the church (also set in Boston). One can really not underestimate the power of the church in Boston, as is stated repeatedly in the film, aswell as with multiple subtler inferences. Most of the Globe reporters working on the story were noted Catholics themselves. This is brought to the screen in multiple wonderfully subtle ways, particularly with Rachel Mcaddams’ Pfeiffer’s relationship with her Nana, shown to us through a series of brief yet very telling moments. The power of an outsider is a key theme to the film with it even being commented upon by Stanley Tucci’s lawyer character, himself Armenian, that it “takes an outsider” to uncover the truth. For Spotlight that outsider is Liev Schreiber as the new Jewish editor of the Globe, Martin Baron. Above anything else this just shows the deep rooted nature of the Catholicism in Boston, and ultimately much of the globe, and I’m not talking about the newspaper. At its core the film is about selflessness, all of this fight against power was to serve the survivors and victims’, never once to serve the paper. A further prime example of selflessness from real life would be the reporters own wanting for there to be no closing title card revealing the 2003 Pulitzer Prize win that the work received. The film instead ends with multiple harrowing blocks of text revealing other places where widespread abuse had been uncovered. We’re only looking at white text on a black background, but the lack of black we see and the amount of white is a harrowing image that I will never forget. Although it would be ridiculous to equate this to very well paid actors appearing in smaller roles, one can garner a clear sense of ensemble amongst the cast, bar one clear Oscar clip ready (but certainly not inorganic) outburst from Mark Ruffalo, the film really doesn’t put it’s extremely well cast array of talent in positions where they are serving more than the story. This is definitely not to say that the characters aren’t well developed or uninteresting, but for me there is something to be said for Richard Jenkins stealing the show multiple times with just his voice, and going purely uncredited. Absolute everybody is serving the story here and the atmosphere is infectious and makes the film the brilliant feature that it is.
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All throughout the film there was a clear and major focus on making the film as realistic and truthful as humanly possible. Mark Ruffalo even would have Rezendes deliver his lines to him in-between breaks. The real Robinson commented on Michael Keaton stating that it was like “watching yourself in a mirror, yet having no control of the mirror image”, similarly Rezendes commented that “watching Mark Ruffalo re-enact five months of [his] life was like looking in a funhouse mirror". There was a clear acknowledgment by the Globe too that they understood the care that was being taken with the film in telling the story, with them approving costumes, production, aswell as certain actors, actresses and even the script. The reality of the film also bleeds into certain castings with Jimmy LeBlanc’s performance as Patrick McSorley, one of the many survivors whose stories are told within the film, being a survivor himself of clerical abuse. The power of this moment is brought forward by the impeccable writing and performers, but this context brings a shocking and affecting verité to the scene too. Another rather obvious reason for an underrating of the film is the heavy dark truth of the subject matter making return viewing a far cry from a feature like Parasite (or God forbid Green Book). Films like Spotlight, Schindlers List and 12 Years a Slave are almost always the butt of cheap jokes where the punchline is the worst film to watch at any given moment. There’s no shame in these jokes, I’ve certainly made them myself, but when we do return to these films we remember their immense power and why they won their Oscars in the first place. It’s a factor far larger than guilt and a feeling of importance, there is truly immense skill and craft in all of these films, making them all more than deserving winners in my opinion.
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Spotlight does of course follow in a grand lineage of newspaper movies, which in many ways isn’t actually that grand. When people talk about the classic newspaper feature, they talk about the multiple versions of The Front Page but can’t really specify one, aswell as of course the holy grail of them all; All The President’s Men, which will always be the master of them all undisputedly. But for me, bar its two major stars in Redford and Hoffman, Spotlight follows rather brilliantly in its footsteps by always serving the story. Perhaps the seriousness and profound pain at the core of this story over the Watergate scandal lends to the films leaning more so into a less visual feature, but I feel the core principal is still the same. It may very well be a very simple comparison, and in many ways a deeply problematic one when it comes to the subject matter of the actual case, but one can very clearly draw a line between the craft and intelligence of McCarthy as he presents the story and the very team at Spotlight that he’s spotlighting... in Spotlight. A cheap repetition perhaps, or certainly, but this is certainly not a cheap film and is one that I hope will rekindle a following as the years go by.
- Thomas Carruthers
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