SPOTLIGHT: This Little Light of Mine

Director: Tom McCarthy
Writers: Josh Singer, Tom McCarthy
Cast: Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, Brian d'Arcy James
Runtime: 128 mins.
2015

I can't think of anything special about Spotlight. That sounds like a slight but in this case it is not. As a friend put it on facebook, 2015 has been a great year for solid, classical filmmaking. Spotlight may be the foremost example of this, a procedural drama low on panache but high on unshakable craftsmanship.

The film follows the Boston Globe's Spotlight team of investigative reporters through every step of their journey down the rabbit hole of child molestation in the Catholic Church. The ordeal begins inauspiciously enough, with the team digging around an old story while trying to remain sensitive towards the power and respect that the Church commands in their city. As threads start to unravel, it becomes clear that this is not an isolated incident, but rather a wide-ranging systemic cover-up. The scandal grows, and the team finds that they have poked an enormous cultural hornets' nest.


Director Tom McCarthy may bear the dubious distinction of having the largest movie-to-movie leap in quality of any director this year, as his 2014 contribution to cinema was the Adam Sandler vehicle The Cobbler. I keep returning to one descriptor every time I think about Spotlight: restraint. McCarthy guides us along capably, always apportioning out just enough information to keep us interested and curious. Its approach to characterization is minimalistic; the dialogue always concerns the matter at hand, and we only catch glimpses of who these people are outside of their work life. Character is built through mannerisms, and revealed in the ways these characters choose to solve the puzzles of information gathering. This process never feels tedious or bogged down; the plot is airtight, and it unfolds gracefully thanks to some laser sharp editing and pacing.

For most of the movie the audience has a predominantly intellectual relationship with the events of the film, a purposeful choice that reflects the laboriousness of constructing a news story. These people are sticking their noses into some awfully inhumane territory, but they're professionals and it's their job. That changes in the final act, when the stylistic and emotional restraint pays dividends because of how the movie has trained us to expect subdued, analytical drama. Every time a character cracks at the seams and shares something personal, or looks quietly at a street of playing children overshadowed by the looming hulk of a chapel, the moment hits harder than it would in a flashier movie. Spotlight leaves you with a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, because it manages to hit you in the gut when you were expecting a head shot.

Spotlight avoids the potential melodrama of survivors' stories by couching those narratives within that of investigative reporting. Instead we get something more elemental, a clash between three titanic social structures: the Church, the justice system, and the media. The pleasure of Spotlight is watching these behemoths wrestle each other and jockey for position, but the film never forgets that at the locus of this conflict are hundreds of broken lives.

4 / 5  BLOBS