The Curiously Generic Journalists of “Spotlight”

By Richard Brody
New Yorker
November 11, 2015

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-curiously-generic-journalists-of-spotlight

Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo, Brian d’Arcy James, Michael Keaton, and John Slattery in “Spotlight,” a film about the Boston Globe’s investigation of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

The fine points of journalistic investigation are often thrilling to observe in the new movie “Spotlight,” nowhere more so than in the document-centered work by which reporters coax information from the government. Set mainly in 2001, the movie unfolds the work done by a quartet of reporters at the Boston Globe (called the Spotlight team) who revealed that many local priests had been sexually preying on minors, that the church had been doing its best to cover up their crimes, and that the local government was also complicit in that cover-up.

Yet, despite the movie’s stirring depiction of the vital societal role played by fearlessly independent newspapers, and despite its vision of horrific but essential truths revealed by deeply committed journalists, “Spotlight” ultimately leaves behind the numbing satisfaction of familiar emotions and the dull thud of familiar gratifications. What the movie needed to do was to spark curiosity and fascination about the psychology of the people involved in the investigation (including those involved against their will).

That investigation involves personal sources and academic research, and it gets its emotional fury from the testimonies of victims. But the movie’s McGuffin, the very pivot of the story, is a court motion made by the newspaper seeking the release of hitherto-sealed documents related to suits brought by victims against the Archdiocese. The moment of triumph involves a judge whose ruling frees up another batch of documents and a court clerk who controls access to a photocopy machine.

The judge before whom the newspaper and the Archdiocese plead, Constance Sweeney (who is played in the film by Laurie Heineman), is a former Catholic-school student who is believed to be favorable to the Church. As it turns out (no spoiler here), Sweeney rules in the Globe’s favor, which helps the Spotlight team push their investigation forward. As I watched the movie, I was utterly frustrated—I wanted the camera to be a fly on the wall in Judge Sweeney’s chambers as she discussed the case with her law clerk, or perhaps with a colleague, so that her reasoning would become part of the film. No such luck; the ruling is delivered, and the journalists get back to work.

As it turns out, Sweeney (who is still a judge in Massachusetts) is as fascinating a character as any in the film, and she deserved her moment in the cinematic, um, spotlight. For that matter, so does the clerk with the photocopy access (I think that the character is played in the film by Robert B. Kennedy). From the look of things, the clerk seems unsympathetic to the reporter, Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), who comes to his desk in search of documents that ought to have been there but have gone missing. It’s clear that the Archdiocese, or someone in cahoots with the Church, has slipped those papers out of their binder. But now, after rulings by Sweeney and the other judge (played by Robert Clarke), Rezendes asserts his right to access, and that’s where the photocopier comes into play.

In effect, the cast of supporting judicial characters in “Spotlight” are the anti-Kim Davises of the Massachusetts government. They wrestle with their own experiences and emotions as they make decisions that (as the film suggests) they know will to put a religious institution with which they deeply identify in a sharply negative public light. Yet the movie, as it’s written (by Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer) and directed (by McCarthy), breezes by their moral conflicts, treating their actions solely as pieces in the puzzle of a journalistic procedural.

The movie also filters out the personal aspects of the journalists’ work, taking them solely as characters, without considering their character. It’s a strange omission, which crashes against one of the movie’s most memorable lines, by one of its heroes, the attorney Mitch Garabedian (played by Stanley Tucci), who represents many victims of pedophile priests and is the crucial source for Rezendes’s reporting. Garabedian, speaking of the code of silence in the Catholic community regarding the issue, says, “If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.” In effect, what Garabedian—and the movie that makes him its incidental mouthpiece—says is that personal attitudes are political, and private conduct and thoughts are very much a matter of societal interest. The movie is as much about changing attitudes toward the truth as it is about the quest for truth.

The journalists’ investigation—as overseen by the Globe’s soft-spoken but tough-minded new editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber)—is focussed not on the priests themselves but on the cover-up by the Church and its officials, starting with Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law (played by Len Cariou). In the course of the film, Law and other Church representatives speak—for the most part, briefly—with Baron and the Spotlight journalists. What they don’t do is to speak with each other, which is the main thing that the movie left me wanting to hear. What did they say and do, within the Church and among themselves, off-duty, to justify their actions?

Of course, any thinking person (as Baron understood) can only be furious at the priests and their crimes, at the Church and its cover-up, and can only be dismayed by the Church’s betrayal of its mission and of its followers, and grateful for the Globe’s revelation of the truth about these multiple layers of misconduct. That’s why it would be all the more interesting and important to hear the officials discuss the situation among themselves, to hear the defenders of the Church, whether inside the institution, within the community at large, or even within the Globe, years earlier—people who, in their time and their milieu, passed as reasonable and honorable. There are issues about which we reasonable and honorable people may well be judged as irrational, irresponsible, and utterly oblivious not so many years from now. It’s important to hear not just the heroes but also the goats, in order to try not to become them.

The personal lives of the journalists—starting with Baron’s—are crucial to the investigation. Baron is laughingly described in the film as “an unmarried man of the Jewish faith who hates baseball.” It’s treated as a crucial bit of information because Baron shows up at the Globe as an outsider—geographically (imported from a Miami paper), culturally (Boston, it’s said in the course of the film, is fifty-three per cent Catholic), and intimately (he’s not a family man)—and therefore decides to focus the Spotlight team on an issue that the paper had hitherto been covering only glancingly, in deference to readers’ presumed sympathies and sensibilities. Baron’s background, as presented, frees him from the local prejudices and presumptions that kept the paper from digging into the issue earlier.

Yet the journalists themselves, whose personal characteristics are hinted at throughout as a factor in their work, are left as ciphers functioning solely as journalists, without private lives—even when the script itself drops hints that intersect strangely with the movie’s subject, as when Rezendes and Garabedian commiserate about not being married because of the demands of their work, and the unmarried Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) is seen living chastely in the home of her fervently religious grandmother. It’s a strange series of allusions and hints.

The subject of the film, after all, is the inability to resist desire—priests who commit crimes, betray their vows, and breach the basic compact of human decency by committing sexual acts with minors. Yet, in effect, the Globe journalists themselves seem to have taken a sort of vow of celibacy. Of course, they’ve not literally done anything of the kind, and it would be surprising if they had no sex lives at all while they worked on the story. But the movie hints that hedonism, the pursuit (even licit, legal, consensual) of pleasure is itself a mark against seekers of truth, that the very pursuit of truth about sexual crimes is a vow that puts the seekers above and outside carnal desire.

People who have affairs, watch movies, dine, read books, go to ballgames, who like to collect stamps or build model trains or listen to music or look at pornography or go fishing—people with tendencies, personalities, idiosyncrasies, peccadillos, desires, frustrated desires, or anything in life beside their public functions—somehow manage to fulfill their public functions nonetheless. Some people manage to channel their personal interests actively into their public functions. Others only manage to keep them out. But, as “Spotlight” merely hints, those personal characteristics can’t help but come into play at work and in all public affairs. The movie suggests that such traits—which McCarthy rigorously keeps out of the movie—are all the more central to its concerns. Yet McCarthy instead perpetuates the myth of the super-achiever who’s only interested in his or her work, a notion that’s all the less admirable or relevant in the light of the story itself, which places in the forefront not the quality of work but the moral purpose of work.

The reason for focussing so closely on the details of “Spotlight,” on what’s in and what’s out, is that the movie leaves nothing else to focus on, because it has no style. Style in movies is a living symbol—an act of elision that, whether in image or gesture, in visual composition or mode of performance, conveys far more than is displayed in action. If images are tiles in a mosaic, stylistic flourishes are cinematic box tops that suggest contents that are not on view but are integral to the film. For “Spotlight,” the absence of style—the style of no style, of a literal-minded and earnest realism that conveys the idea of the story without reaching into its further implications—places attention squarely on what the movie is about.

There’s no rule to apply that determines what a movie is about. What a movie’s about isn’t determined by its subject, idea, or message. The filmmakers’ desire to limit the story to the investigation, to the work that brings results, doesn’t suffice to define it. What a movie is about is a matter of vision and imagination, of perception and inference—that of the filmmakers, but also that of viewers. In the case of “Spotlight,” its substance is somewhat less than what I imagined, and is doubtless far less that what many other viewers are likely to derive from it. The array of incidents and ideas that McCarthy and Singer round up and pull together is far narrower than the ones that the premise implies. They’ve got hold of a subject that’s too big, too complex, too unruly for their imaginations.