I’m not a big movie guy in general, and the Academy’s leanings the last few years in Best Picture nods haven’t done a lot to bring me back to the fold – not that they’re choosing bad movies, but that they’ve favored a lot of movies I wouldn’t even want to watch. (I’m sure 12 Years a Slave was amazing. I just can’t watch that kind of cruelty.) I did watch Birdman, last year’s winner, and thought it was clever but lacked any sort of resolution to the main story, as if the screenwriter had a great idea for a movie script but couldn’t figure out how to finish it.
Spotlight (amazon • iTunes), which of course won Best Picture earlier this week, appealed to me more than any recent winner I can think of. The story shows how a small group of reporters at the Boston Globe known as the Spotlight team conducted a months-long investigative effort that uncovered the scope of the abuse scandal within the Catholic Church, including the fact that the Archbishop of the Boston diocese, Cardinal Bernard Law (no relation), knew about it and did nothing beyond moving the pedophile priests around to new parishes. It’s a film that’s going to be talky – big on dialogue, light on action, highly dependent on everything from acting to directing to editing to make it a compelling film. The whole concept of a dramatic film that has no action, no sex, no romance, not even a proper antagonist (in the conventional sense of a ‘villain’), feels very British to me, just because their TV programs and films tend to be more story-driven in my entirely anecdotal experience.
Spotlight is an incredible film in the most old-fashioned sense: It tells a great story and never lets up until the end. The pacing was perfect, the performances were very strong, and no nonsensical subplots interfered with the unfolding of the main story. Only one scene rang a little false, one that felt like it was inserted so that there was a Big Dramatic Conflict to use on awards shows, but otherwise the screenplay was taut and efficient, wasting few words and even less time on irrelevant details.
I thought the performances were almost all excellent, yet none seemed likely to win an award – I was surprised to see the nominations the cast received, because these performances were all so understated. Liev Schreiber plays the new editor of the Globe, perceived as an interloper because he’s not from Boston and because he’s Jewish, with such restraint that it was hard to remember who was behind the glasses and facial hair. Mark Ruffalo, playing reporter Mike Rezendes, was just as unrecognizable with a little change to his hairstyle, a slight accent, and, aside from the one scene where he blows up at Keaton’s character, delivers a similarly spartan portrayal. A mediocre writer could have had him explode at the imperious file clerk who won’t give him access to public records that would prove damning to the Church, and a mediocre actor would have hammed it up, but instead, we get a scene that works because it’s so mundane.
The lesson of Spotlight the movie – as distinct from the scandal, which certainly gets its air time in the film but doesn’t need me to thinkpiece it any further – is that the drama in a good dramatic film doesn’t have to come from the screenplay. This story was inherently compelling: A small team of reporters, given unusual autonomy, discovers and reveals a massive, decades-long cover-up of sexual abuse by one of the world’s most powerful and most implicitly trusted authorities through hard work and ingenuity. I could give you a dozen places where someone could have Hollywoodized the script – a screaming confrontation between reporters and church officials would be the most obvious – but instead we get a simple, linear story, where the narrative greed comes from the piecemeal uncovering of the scandal. Even my short attention span was riveted for two solid hours, and when the story was over, the film is over, and if that last scene wasn’t real, well, I am going to pretend that that’s what actually happened the day the story finally ran.
The defunct Phoenix also did some great work on the story and does get a brief mention in the film, although there’s a debate over how much credit they deserve. The Globe certainly pushed the story much farther.
I’m going to watch a few of last year’s highly-rated films now that many of them are available digitally (legally – I won’t Torrent), so if you’ve got a favorite or two, nominated or otherwise, throw them in the comments. I will watch movies in any language, but I draw the line at Room, which I think I will find far too upsetting because I have a young daughter.