“It may take a village
to raise a child but it takes a village to abuse one too.”
It also takes a system of good to destroy a system of evil.
Just as abuse cannot be perpetrated without the complicity of people who look
the other way, nothing as remarkable as the investigation into sexual abuse by
the clergy done by The Boston Globe
could have ever been accomplished by a lone gunman. It took a team. This
approach to this true story is one of the best elements of Thomas McCarthy’s
fantastic “Spotlight,” one of the leanest, most purposeful dramas I’ve seen in
a long time. It is a film devoid of melodramatic speeches or characters
designed purely to tug at the heartstrings. It is deliberate, accomplished, and
intense, playing like a thriller more than a piece of Oscar bait. McCarthy
proves to be the perfect director for this material, as his work with
characters and actors ground the piece in a way that more style-heavy directors
would not have. In fact, seeing “Truth” the next day made the strengths of “Spotlight”
even more readily apparent. They’re both good films, and both will find their
audiences, but “Spotlight” stands above not only “Truth” but most of the major
movies screened this year at TIFF. It’s a phenomenal accomplishment.
In 2001, the Spotlight unit of The Boston Globe was working on a story about police officers when
a new boss (played with subtle dignity by Liev Schreiber) asks them to focus on
a breaking story. A priest has been accused of molesting dozens of children.
And while, sadly, that’s a story that the paper has reported before, there is
evidence that Cardinal Law knew about it. Is there a system out there
protecting pedophile priests? “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton) leads a team
that includes Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams)
and Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James) and the quartet begins an investigation.
They learn pretty quickly that these allegations against the
clergy are nothing new. In fact, the paper has been tipped off about it before,
and have generally buried the story or failed to investigate, often due to a
perceived fear that the very religious community of Boston wouldn’t take kindly
to an attack on the Church. The Spotlight team faces opposition at every turn,
from the lawyers who have worked carefully to hide settlements in these cases
to those within the paper who think it’s a non-story. “There were a few bad
eggs,” or, “It’s not a crisis.” Of course, we know it was and is a crisis, and the
Spotlight team would go on to win a Pulitzer for their landmark investigation.
The room for error with “Spotlight” is amazing. Think of
all the overly emotional beats that McCarthy and co-writer Josh Singer could
have hit, and that could have been underlined by gauzy cinematography and an
overcooked score. None of that happens. McCarthy and Singer push their true
story forward with the speed of a moving train, focusing on intelligent
dialogue more than anything else. These are smart people who are good at their job, and that’s a rarity
in film, believe it or not. They face many setbacks, but they don’t feel like
ones designed by a screenwriter, and they have the passion and intelligence to
push through.
Given its ensemble nature—there’s not a single bad
performance, which means McCarthy deserves a lot of directorial credit—it’s
hard to pick out an actor or two in “Spotlight” but Ruffalo feels like the
stand out. He plays Rezendas as a fast-talking, driven guy who won’t take no
for an answer. Watch his body language in a sequence in which he has to deal
with red tape to get some key documents. Just looking at him, you get the
impression that he would wait days to get what he needs. And Ruffalo does get
the film’s big speech, which could finally win him a long-deserved Oscar. But it’s a speech that feels genuine and from his character, instead of designed to win a trophy.
Keaton gets a big speech too, and he really grounds the piece as the team’s leader.
Every performance works, including smaller ones played by Stanley Tucci, John
Slattery and Billy Crudup. We’ll be writing a lot more about this film in the
coming months, and I’ll get to Masanobu Takayanagi’s tight, fluid, non-showy
cinematography then. For now, just know that of all the big premieres in the
Fall Fest season that I’ve seen, this is the stand-out.
Which kind of makes seeing “Truth” the next day a little unfair. This is a solid drama about
journalism and the failure to see the forest for the trees by a lot of people
in this increasingly ill-informed world, but it’s not the artistic
accomplishment of McCarthy’s film. Over-reliance on a heated score, a few too
many purposeful monologues (I half-expected someone to say “You can’t handle the truth”
unironically) and a clear bias leave this work short of what it could have
been. It’s still a good film, and I’ll get into further detail in next month’s
theatrical review, but it’s not a great one.
Cate Blanchett brings her intensity to the role of Mary
Mapes, the producer of “60 Minutes” when the definitive news program aired a
segment in 2004 that called into question President George Bush’s military record.
We all know what happened next. The story turned out to be deeply flawed, most
so in the arena of military documents that may have been forgeries. As Mapes
and her team try to make clear in “Truth,” what got lost is the fact that the
story itself was very likely true (at least according to the film) but the
nitpicking over how it came to light destroyed careers, including Mapes and Dan
Rather (played with excellent gravity by Robert Redford), who saw a wildly
influential legacy destroyed by political posturing. This is a story worth
telling, especially in an era when we seem to be losing the bigger picture in
favor of individual complaints and unfocused reporting. “Truth” argues that the Rather scandal was the beginning of that end. Hopefully, films like it and “Spotlight”
can light a fire under reporters in both print and television, to
do what’s right as we look to the upcoming election and beyond. Probably not,
but that very fire still makes for an entertaining film.
