Lots of people will tell you they watch movies to shut their brain off for a couple hours. Not me. It's why I have a well documented soft spot for mysteries. They keep me thinking and address me like a goddamn grownup. I had journalistic investigation drama Spotlight in my crosshair way before it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Movie, but I have curiously watched it the morning of the ceremony. It's crazy how such an accolade can change your perception of something you just watched and appreciated to some degree. Spotlight is a decent movie. It's smart and it delivers an important message, but it will always suffer the burden of expectations because it was so not the best movie Hollywood offered us in 2015.
Spotlight tells the true story of the Boston Globe's investigative journalism team, tasked with digging into an old story about lawyer Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci) accusing the local Cardinal of letting one of his priest molest little boys. The team gets to work and quickly uncovers a pattern in the ranks of the Catholic church. The story is much bigger than they would've thought, the clergy is well aware of it and has its claws set so deep into the city of Boston that getting to the truth is difficult, next to impossible really. Not for a gang of overzealous and dedicated investigative journalists it ain't. The case earned the Spolight team the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2003.
So, Spotlight has two major thing going for itself: a riveting (and true) story and a cast of beloved actors. Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Michael Keaton and Liev Schrieber are the best known commodities, but it also featured underrated actors such as Stanley Tucci and Paul Guilfoyle, and last but not least John Slattery, better known to television audiences as that magnificent bastard Roger Sterling. As it often is the case with superstar cast in low key movies, they tend to step on each others toes a little. Parts like McAdams' and Schrieber were a bit marginal and maybe didn't deserve such headliner talent. Mark Ruffalo and Stanley Tucci delivered the best performances of the movie as they often do.
Neal Huff was great, but it was one of his first parts with an actual name.
Acting is a major reason why Spotlight is successful but I have to say it: God, it looks like shit. I'm talking straight-to-television-afternoon-hallmark-channel-biopic ugly here. Spotlight is so deliberately stern it's annoying. The lighting is super tame (replicating a soulless corporate office), the actors are underdressed. They look like penguins in their everyday people attire. I understand that the story and the message are what's important here, but would it have been possible to have a little fun here? Competitor for best movie Oscar The Big Short had a similar office dynamic and a much better sense of style. If you're going to strip your movie of everything that makes a movie fun to watch, why not make it a television series?
So, pardon me if I couldn't completely get behind Spotlight. I do not doubt its sense of purpose for one second, but it is a stern and humorless film that reminded me of my old man giving me shit in front of my friends when I was a teenager. It's really tough to judge it for what it is because it's not trying to be anything a moviegoing audience should pay for. It is a television show masquerading as a film. I'm not saying it should've been all neon and glitter, but Spotlight is a one-trick pony that borrows credibility from its subject in order to bolster its meaningfulness in the Hollywoodian landscape and films that do that are a major pet peeve of mine.
See it for the acting, I guess. Mark Ruffalo was once again incredible and of course didn't win the Academy Award he deserved. Rent it or see it on Netflix. Either way it doesn't require a big screen to appreciate. I thought it drew a scary portrait of how still relevant and powerful the clergy still was in the American political landscape and I believe it will be this movie's legacy. Wasn't crazy about the way it portrayed Boston as complicit to the horrors of the Catholic church (I think most people who live there are fundamentally good working class people), but the world we're living in is prey to influences we don't notice or understand and thanks to the journalists of Spotlight, we have a better grip on our future. They deserve the Hollywood treatment. I just think they deserved a better Hollywood treatment than that. They were the reason why the movie won the Oscar and it should've been the opposite.
Maybe I would've appreciated a little better for what it is if it didn't win the goddamn Oscar for best movie.
I don't know.
