Batman, The Hulk, and Sabretooth come together to fight a gang of paedophile priests and their cavalry of lawyers. The 2016 Academy award winner for best picture, Spotlight has an ensemble cast with numerous immediately recognizable actors such as Michael Keaton (Batman in DCs Batman, and Batman Returns), Mark Ruffalo (The Hulk in Marvels Avengers series), Rachel McAdams, and Liv Schrieber (Sabretooth in X-Men Origins: Wolverine).
They come together to play out the real-life story of The Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” team and its investigation into cases of widespread systemic child sex abuse in the Boston area by numerous Roman Catholic priests in the years 2001 and 2002. This series of stories won The Globe the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in the year 2003. Tom McCarthy, the director of the movie, chooses to tell this story in an extremely subdued manner that still goes on to completely shock the viewers as the case goes on to build in the film.
Given the basis for the story-line of the film, the story-telling could have taken an extremely dramatic turn but the movie proves to be quite the opposite. The story-telling, the acting, the cinematography and even the music is really sombre. Everyone is holding back and there is really only one scene in the entire film where one of the characters has an outburst of emotion. The more you watch the movie, the more it turns into not a movie. The film becomes a documentary of real people doing their jobs. The actors disappear into their characters and the audience start to view them as the people that they are playing, and it is remarkable to be able to say that because of the recognizability of the actors in this film.
Michael Keaton does an astounding job at depicting the head of the Spotlight investigation team, Walter Robinson. When comparing Keaton’s performance in the film to interview clips of the real-life Walter Robinson, it is amazing to see how closely he mimics all of his mannerisms. For me personally, Mark Ruffalo’s performance as Mike Rezendes, has to be one of his best in his entire career and it righteously got him the nomination for best actor in a supporting role. His acting is the most engaging, and it is simply because he plays a character that is the most engaged in the story itself. He does something really different with his voice, and to be honest it is a bit jarring at first, but as you continue to watch, it just becomes him and it’s difficult to look past Ruffalo as anything but his character.
All of the actors’ performances is about pushing forward the story. We learn very little about the characters’ personal lives or dynamics because Tom McCarthy made sure that the focus of the movie stays on how these journalists worked towards uncovering the story. The movie is much like a documentary, as I stated earlier, because it is so purely factual. Investigative reporting is a long and tedious process, full of dead-ends and monotonous tasks. This of course doesn’t mean that there aren’t moments of intensity, but the reporting process of these kinds of stories often require mind-numbing work. Therefore, it might be difficult for anyone trying to capture these processes in an engaging manner. As Sasha Pfieffer, key journalist from the Spotlight team, said “…it’s not that what we do is boring, but it’s not cinematic”.
Tom McCarthy’s uses the magic of montages and long shots is a brilliant way to convey the drudgery of the actual work that goes into investigative journalism and bring cinematic beauty into it. Key developments in the plot are surrounded by fast pacing work and shots. The use of the score, the colour palettes and the camera work are held-back and thereby, when any of these elements get stylized, even for a brief moment, it draws the audience into the situation. The understated tone of the entire movie is a commentary on the nature work in investigative journalism. The work is sober and its professionals are meticulous.
Ever since the silent film era, journalists have been stereotyped as the crusader willing to use questionable tactics in order to land the scoop or the expose on the rich and powerful. Therefore, making them into idealists and hardened cynics, crusaders and midnight conspirators, our attitude towards them continually swings from dark to bright and back again. (Good, 1986). These are the exact ideas that early movies about journalists like His Girl Friday, Ace in the Hole and Deadline U.S.A play into, wherein the journalists are sometimes portrayed as the hero or the villain.
Movies like Spotlight shift the focus from archetyping the journalist, into following the tedious investigation that goes into the unglamorous daily of a reporter. The actual reporters whose stories the film follows were completely involved in the process and were given the liberty to tweak things throughout the movie that didn’t ring true to their stories. Everything down to The Globe’s newsroom was reconstructed to the dot. This is exactly how a movie about journalism should be.
An article on The Wire, titled “Spotlight is About Journalism as it should be, But Isn’t Anymore”, 2016, talks about how the movie documents the real investigative journalism process which is a tradition that seems to be disappearing in contemporary media. These deep and shocking truths require months and years of painstaking and unglamorous work. The tradition of this sort of journalism that requires accuracy seems to be dying along with print media, and India hasn’t seen such investigations take place ever since the 1980s: The PAC killing, Bofors, Bhagalpur blindings. Modern day media only sees trial media, where a whiff of controversy is almost immediately used as “exposés” without any actual follow up or verifying.
The existence of such meticulous work around the world the has gone down with submissions for the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service going down from 159 in 1990, to 66 in 2015.Thereby, the hope that Spotlight carried was its ability to ignite the revival of well-done investigative journalistic work.
The only problem with Spotlight is that it isn’t a “family movie night” type of film or something that you can watch with your brain tuned off just so that you can catch a break after a long day of work. It is a 2 hour-long movie, with new information about the case that’s being followed revealed in slow progression along the film. But for audiences who enjoy these sorts of political thrillers, it is a great watch. It makes the audience think deeper about the kind of choices that newspapers, and other forms of journalistic media, have to make and the boundaries that they overstep for the greater good.