“Birdman” couldn’t do it, but “Spotlight” just may win Michael Keaton an Oscar.
He plays a member of the Boston Globe investigative team as though he had been working in newsrooms all his life and reminds us he can shine in an ensemble, as well as a leading role.
The Pittsburgh native stars alongside Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams and Brian d’arcy James in the story of how the Globe pursued reports about predatory priests and the Catholic Church’s cover-up of the molestation. Priests were shuffled from one parish to the next or placed on “sick leave” while their superiors lost sight of the victims — often young boys from poor or broken homes.
Newspaper staffers will love this movie and appreciate how it doesn’t misrepresent their profession. But, thanks to director-writer Tom McCarthy and screenwriter Josh Singer, the public will get a rare look behind the curtain where the work can be tedious, difficult, discouraging, heartbreaking, personal and monumentally important.
Starring: Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Brian d’arcy James.
Rating: R for some language including sexual references.
After a brief but portentous incident at a police station in 1976, the action shifts to 2001 as the Boston Globe welcomes a new editor. The taciturn Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) is an outsider in almost every way. He’s fresh from the Miami Herald and trying to get a feel for Boston, and Jewish in a city with a large Catholic population and readership. The guy isn’t even much of a baseball fan.
All of this makes him both an easy unfair target and just the person to set this investigation into motion.
On his first day, when he’s still learning the names of his colleagues, he makes what Walter “Robby” Robinson (Mr. Keaton) categorizes as a “gutsy call.” He orders the staff to look at defrocked priest and accused sexual predator John J. Geoghan and what the archdiocese did or did not know and do about him.
The task falls to the four-person Spotlight team — editor Robinson and reporters Mike Rezendes (Mr. Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Ms. McAdams) and Matt Carroll (Mr. James) — which normally picks its own projects. Robinson is easygoing until he needs to stiffen his spine and speech, Mike is a bundle of energy and passion, Sacha scribbles notes furiously as people open up to her, and Matt knows how to mine for data.
Nothing about this assignment is easy, with documents and lips that are sealed, doors that are slammed, lawyers who are extremely guarded or cagey, friends who want them to stop with the questions, and survivors of sexual abuse who recount episodes with vivid, melancholy details but don’t want their names in the paper. One never even told his wife what happened.
“Spotlight,” which nails the details about how reporters dress, eat and work, treats this investigation as a suspenseful detective story. But it never loses sight of the young people harmed by pedophile priests, the church that figuratively and literally looms large throughout, and the mandate to keep pursuing the story when other editors might have been satisfied with far less much earlier.
It acknowledges that the paper did not aggressively pursue leads years earlier — failing to do follow-ups or exercise investigatory muscle, dismissing one advocate as little more than a pest and discounting another — but it celebrates the heart and mission of journalism. It shows the presses running in a way that is old-fashioned, thrilling and about to echo around the world.
Movie editor Barbara Vancheri: bvancheri@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1632. Read her blog: www.post-gazette.com/madaboutmovies.
First Published: November 20, 2015, 5:00 a.m.
