Spotlight [Film]

I don't go to movies often. For the most part, I find the money that goes into making a movie requires that it make a lot of money and so I consider movies more of a commercial product than a medium of artistic expression (even though I recognize that personal skill and vision are found even in some of the most commercial movies). While I certainly enjoy the big blockbuster now and then (particularly anything with superheroes), I also don't usually go away with any deeper appreciation of the human condition. My favorite movies don't have action figures for sale in toy stores.

And with that snobbier-than-I-really-mean caveat, I turn my attention to the movie Spotlight.

Based upon the story of the Boston Globe's reporting of the Roman Catholic priest pedophile cover-up, it is a story full of potential for sensationalist story telling. Luckily, the filmmakers here are not interested in sensation. They're here to show us how a team of reporters took on a story, not of their own choosing, and slowly uncovered a far reaching conspiracy that ran deep into the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, not only in Boston, but around the world.

First, the cast is amazing. All of them keep the emotion under control, keep the characters human while still letting the enormity of the situation run over them. Even when Mark Ruffalo (who, I'm surprised to say, didn't recognize for the first few minutes he was on screen) is given a meltdown to perform, he gives us more humanity than histrionics. Rachel McAdams is heartbreaking in her understatement. And when Michael Keaton gives us a pretty big reveal towards the end of the movie, it would be easy to miss due to his subtlety (and I believe we all know how larger than life Keaton can get). The whole cast maintains this sort of even keel throughout, the heroes never too heroic, the villains never threatening in a cartoon way. It feels like an acting style that I haven't seen in movies for ages (but, again, I don't see a lot of movies) and that each actor maintains it is astonishing to me.

Second, the way they tell the story creates the uneasy feeling that there are no exceptionally good people here, just a few that are making a brave decision to get it right in this one moment. I don't want to say too much more about that, as I feel it is part of the pleasure/discomfort/human-condition-revealed-ness of watching. Let's just say that there is complicity to be shared beyond the immediate perpetrators of the abuse and its cover-up.

Third, on a personal level, I wonder where I am in this, where the people closest to me are in this. As a very pious, religious, gay boy in the 1970s (Lutheran, not Roman Catholic, but set that aside for now), would I have been a target for a religious authority who preyed on youth? I'm not sure. In a sense, certainly, but I could also be, to speak of it derogatorily, a "tattle-tale." It was part of my piety. Had a priest/pastor tried to seduce me as a 12 year old, I may have gone only so far before my own conscious had gotten to me (and hence would have blamed myself, not the priest) and I would have likely found a way to put a stop to it. Had I gone to my parents with it, as some children in this story did, would mine have been the sort to press charges or would they have kept quiet, told me to not mention it again, as some parents did? I don't like to think about that, which is saying enough.

This is the type of movie I would like to see more of, really. Quiet, subtle, dealing with big issues with a human touch. I hope Spotlight makes enough money and wins some awards to make it attractive to investors to make more.