Spotlight **** (2015, Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, Billy Crudup) – Movie Review

Spotlight is tense, urgent and dynamic, with great performances and a good flavour of the newsroom.

Co-writer / director Tom McCarthy urgently tells the true story of how the Boston Globe’s tenacious Spotlight team of reporters delves into allegations of abuse in the Catholic Church and uncovers a scandal of child molestation and decades-long cover-up in Boston’s religious, legal, and government establishment, rocking the Catholic Church and provoking a worldwide a wave of revelations.

Mark Ruffalo (as Mike Rezendes), Michael Keaton (as Walter ‘Robby’ Robinson), Rachel McAdams (Sacha Pfeiffer) play the reporting team involved, and all of them are absolutely first rate. Liev Schreiber is excellently creepy as the paper’s new owner, Marty Baron (ah, a newspaper baron!). Anybody who’s worked on a newspaper will instantly recognise these characters. They are at once both real people and archetypes.

Regular cinema-goers will probably say that we have been here before, many times, in both aspects of the film, in the child abuse story and investigative journalist departments, so the film lacks a sense of surprise or danger, and the idea that we are being told something we never knew before. All the President’s Men still seems to be the leader of this pack. Spotlight can’t compete with that.

Nevertheless, this is a very good movie, particularly for the vibrant, you-were-there way it captures the atmosphere and characters of the newsroom, so it feels very realistic and convincing. The movie’s characters are individual, quirky and a bit flawed, as well as being the story’s relentlessly questing upright heroes, so this gives some first-rate actors good chances that they devour eagerly. Ruffalo and Keaton are pretty much always good, and here they are at the top of their game. Ruffalo is top billed and in some ways it would be his film but Keaton doesn’t allow that quite to happen. Keaton’s performance here is better even than in Birdman.

McAdams is suitably sincere and intense. John Slattery, Stanley Tucci and Billy Crudup are also essential in the ensemble cast.

McCarthy and Josh Singer’s screenplay is clear and literate, as well as crusading. It shows exactly what it’s like to be a newshound from the inside out: it’s their job to know whether to cover a story, how to select it, research it and uncover it, when to publish it and how to live with the consequences. McCarthy and Singer are terrific on this.

The script makes a strong case for expensive teams of investigative journalists being employed in a moral way to reveal stories that are in the public interest, and that wouldn’t be uncovered in any other way. Nowadays, such journalism is not so much under threat as near-dead, given the collapse of newspaper circulations and proprietors’ cost-cutting staff sackings, and the relentless pursuit of celebrity and trivial gossip that generally passes for journalism. The last big team of investigative journalists was probably the one employed in the UK on the infamous celebrity hacking. This is another film story I look forward to.

If Spotlight is a toast to great journalism, it is a bitter-sweet one. it’s also a kind of valediction to a way of life no one seems to want to afford any more. So, yes, this is a good movie, intelligent and smart, and provoking much thought.

It was nominated for six 2016 Oscars, including Best Motion Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing and Best Supporting Actor (Ruffalo) and Actress (McAdams). Nothing for Keaton, after he was pipped to the Oscar in 2015 by Eddie Redmayne, Now that’s hard!

On 28 February, the producers Michael Sugar, Steve Golin, Nicole Rocklin and Blye Pagon Faust took home the Oscar for Best Picture and screen-writers Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy for Best Original Screenplay.

This kind of movie is an endangered species too. On a $35miliion budget, it took back under $25million in the US, so it will need those awards to come through.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Movie Review

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