If Spotlight has a visual motif, aside from the fact that journalists don't dress well, it resides in the walking.
These Boston Globe reporters and editors create their own perpetual motion machine as they stride through newsrooms, parks, library basements, golf courses and working class neighborhoods. They're always on the move, a kinetic reminder that newsgathering is nothing if not an active endeavor. (You'd think we'd be in better shape.)
That sense of movement extends to Spotlight's drum-tight story, which chronicles the Globe's 2001 investigation of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. Spotlight doesn't capture the paranoid jitters of Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men, the last major movie to devote this kind of thoroughness and intelligence to the newspaper world. But Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer's script, as directed by McCarthy, boasts a similar brand of narrative momentum.
It's a great story about getting the story.
There's a professional hazard involved when a journalist assesses a journalism movie. Chances are my fellow ink-stained wretches and I will get more excited about a film that depicts reporting with such vim and precision than the average moviegoer might.
Then again, as the critic Robert Warshow once wrote, "A man watches a movie, and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man." The man attached to this byline really likes Spotlight, both as a reflection of collaborative journalism's intricacies and as a cinematic experience.
Much of the pleasure derives from the movie's care to get little things right, or things that appear to be little but loom large upon closer inspection. For instance: the way new Globe editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) exerts his outsider status, as a newcomer and a Jew in a largely Catholic community, to take on sacred cows for the public interest.
Or the way Michael Keaton's Walter Robinson, the editor of the paper's investigative Spotlight team, has to reckon with his own blind spots as a member of that community. Or the impulsive curiosity and restlessness of Mark Ruffalo's reporter, Mike Rezendes. Or the way Rachel McAdams' Sacha Pfeiffer uses unfeigned empathy to draw out a source's painful memories.
Spotlight is a story of two intertwined civic institutions and the impact they have on each other and on the public. One of those institutions (the Globe) has had a cozy relationship and ample overlap with the other (the church). The church would like to keep it that way, and it has no reason to expect anything different; the Globe had previously buried stories related to the abuse scandal.
Spotlight gets exciting when the Globe decides to make this de facto partnership something less than cozy. Vital investigative news is rarely a source of comfort for the investigated. But it can make for captivating drama.
Nobody is perfect in Spotlight -- not the reporters and editors, not the clergy, and certainly not those in power within the church who helped protect serial molesters. But in the end it's the system, not the individuals, that has to answer.
"You're missing the overall," Deep Throat admonishes when Woodward gets too caught up in the microelements of the president's men. Spotlight gets the overall, and everything else.
SPOTLIGHT (A)
Directed by Tom McCarthy. R (some language including sexual references). 128 mins. At the AMC NorthPark, Angelika Dallas and Cinemark West Plano.
