Off the Cuff Reviews Spotlight (2015)

I don't normally tend to focus on Oscar-bait movies. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just because I never hear about them as much as I hear about the big blockbusters or the family movies, which are honestly more fun to focus on, especially leading up to a release. After watching today's movie, however, perhaps I should broaden my scope, as Spotlight (2015) proved to be an excellent movie that showed me a different side of cinema that I really should have exposed myself to a long time ago, for one simple reason that I'll get to in due time. Starring Mark Ruffalo as Michael Rezendes, Michael Keaton as Walter 'Robby' Robinson, Rachel McAdams as Sacha Pfeiffer, Liev Schreiber as Marty Baron, John Slattery as Ben Bradlee Jr., Brian d'Arcy James as Matt Carroll and Stanley Tucci as Mitchell Garabedian.

Spotlight (2015)

When retelling a true story on the big screen, it's important to find the right balance between fact and fiction. It's a movie, and it needs to be entertaining, so there are going to be discrepancies between what actually happened in any 'Based on a true story' movie, but finding the line is important, and that's very much based on what the content of the true story is. Telling the story of a never-ending game of Tag isn't quite as important to get right as the story of widespread paedophilia in Boston. This movie gets it about as accurate as I think it could have. Not that I know for sure, since I didn't live in Boston in the early 2000s, but everything seems like it was handled with care. Every aspect of this situation was looked at, every angle explored to some degree. The movie has a disclaimer at the end of the credits that certain names, timelines and characters were changed for the movie, and that seems to be the best way to go about it. It's also not like the movie is campaigning for one particular viewpoint over another. I mean, it obviously takes the stance that paedophilia is wrong, but it doesn't argue that religion or faith is inherently bad, and it doesn't showcase the press as a shining beacon of light when it comes to this issue either. More on that later, though.

Michael Keaton as Robby

What I think I probably love most about the way the movie presents this story is the escalation of it all. It runs at an absolutely perfect pace, and they drip-feed exactly the right amount of information about this issue to keep us engaged. Using the number of priests as an example, it starts out with just the one priest, which you obviously know is a big enough deal as it is. Then, over the course of the first act, the number rises to 2, then 3 then a potential fourth, so there's a small rise here. Then, we learn that the number is 13. That's a huge bombshell, and it's treated with the level of severity that it should be. This is a massive tonal shift for this story, and it goes from just a curiosity in the press to a must-tell story. And the great part is that it's still not done. When the number hits 13, you think to yourself how huge that number is and it couldn't possibly get any higher. Then it hits you with the likely probability that the number is closer to 90. If 13 was a bombshell, 90 is an atomic warhead. And it's not even the number of priests, since as you keep learning about more and more people who have been affected by the crisis and the story gets more and more warped and we learn the ways the church attempted to cover it up and how blatant everything is and... there's an awful lot here, let's put it that way. Learning all this information in one go would honestly be too much, and they do a good job of spacing it out over the two hours the movie has.

Rachel McAdams as Sacha

And we also see how each new piece of information affects the Spotlight team. It's weird to say, but I'm honestly glad we don't learn everything about their personal lives as the movie goes on; the story itself is what's important here, and it's too big to take time out to show a living situation or a parent relationship that probably would have been made up in the first place to add unnecessary drama. The focus is where it needs to be, and it's through the story that we get little bits and pieces of information about our main characters, and those little bits and pieces are really all we need. We learn about Sacha's relationship with her Nan, we learn about Matt's neighbourhood, we learn about Robby's past and we learn about Michael's strained homelife. The main cast do an excellent, if subdued, job in these roles, and the fact that the performances are subdued is once again fine. They're newspaper reporters, they don't need to be giving big grand speeches and emotional outbursts every five minutes; this is reality we're talking about here. When things do come to a head and they do get emotional, it's once again relating to the story and it all feels completely justified. Mark Ruffalo in particular delivers perhaps the best performance I've seen him give. His character was set up so well as someone who likes telling important stories, and his frustration by the end feels completely well built up given the information we learn about not just the scandal itself, but also the nature of the press.

Mark Ruffalo as Michael

Which brings me to what makes this movie so powerful: the story itself. This movie has shown me that if you find an important and fascinating story, that can be all you need. I don't know why it took this movie to teach me that; I'm a storyteller myself, after all, but it's the way this particular story is told here that really got to me. It showcases the power of the press, and how good journalism can change the world, but it also shows how ignorant journalism can cause more harm than good. I like the fact that the movie takes it's time to comment on how this scandal could have been told years ago and it might have saved lives; addressing that legitimately elevates this movie to something more, as a less intelligent movie would have idolised the Boston Globe and called it a day. And, of course, it's not just the journalism angle that makes this story so powerful. The fact that hundreds of officials in the Catholic Church in Boston were involved in paedophilia and no one knew about it would have been a compelling story in and of itself, but the fact that hundreds of officials in the Catholic Church in Boston were involved in paedophilia and everyone knew about it, or bits of it at the very least, is almost morbidly interesting. I haven't been this shaken by a story in a long time. And the fact that this isn't even 100% a work of fiction adds another layer, as evidenced by the movie's closing text. It lists cities in the United States which have had numerous problems with paedophilia in the Catholic Church over the years, and the list they give could have been enough. But, then they list the international cities. And, I expected to see Sydney on the list, at least based on what the movie told us, but to actually see Wollongong on that list was chilling. I was raised Catholic, and even though I'm not devout and don't really practice Catholicism anymore, I still consider myself Catholic on some level. Seeing the words 'Wollongong, Australia' shook me to my core, and not just because I assumed no one in America even knew about Wollongong. Of course, seeing how big the list was is terrifying enough, but to think that there could be people I know that have been directly affected by this sort of thing? That's why stories like these are worth telling, and when they're told right, they can change the world.

Stanley Tucci as Garabedian

Spotlight (2015) is absolutely told right, and is a movie that has affected me more than pretty much any movie I've reviewed for this page. It is a must watch, especially since the problems the movie addresses haven't really gone away. This movie won Best Picture in 2016. I whole-heartedly agree with that decision. 10/10.