UNITED STATES
GQ
By Scott Tobias
In the 16 years I’ve been attending the Toronto International Film Festival, Tom McCarthy’s The Cobbler may be the single worst movie I’ve seen here. And during that time, I’m typically seeing four or five movies a day over seven to ten days, so conservatively speaking, I’ve seen somewhere around 500 movies. Many of them are terrible: Bloated awards-trawlers, impenetrable navel-gazers, “discoveries” by first-time/last-time directors, and those random slot-fillers that yield a masterpiece two percent of the time and a dud the other ninety-eight. But The Cobbler was a special kind of misfire, a magical realist comedy featuring unsettling racial overtones, Adam Sandler at his most clinically depressed, and a shocking series of third-act misjudgments.
As I wrote at the time, “The Cobbler is a paradox: A film that must be seen to be believe, but mustn’t be seen.” One year later, however, McCarthy is back with Spotlight, a gripping account of the Boston Globe’s comprehensive investigation of child sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church, and among people who report on Best Picture frontrunners, it has been declared the Best Picture frontrunner. As worst-to-first comebacks go, pick your analogy: The 1991 Minnesota Twins, ’80s Neil Young to ’90s Neil Young, 1941 to Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s tempting to say that The Cobbler is the sort of terrible movie that only a great director could make, but McCarthy isn’t some cinematic visionary. His other films—The Station Agent, The Visitor, and Win Win—are all small-scale, accessible, meat-and-potatoes dramas that rely on well-honed performances and empathetic storytelling. With The Cobbler, he made the mistake of trying to sing in a higher octave.
Spotlight plays to his strengths. As scripted by McCarthy and Josh Singer, the film succeeds first and foremost in bringing order to an extremely complex piece of team reporting. The “Spotlight” team of investigative journalists at the Globe—played here by Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, and Brian d’Arcy James—are not merely compiling cases of abuse within the Church, but working to expose a cover-up that goes all the way to Cardinal Law and beyond. And they’re doing it in a tribalist city where the Church wields influence over every institution, including the newspaper, which can ill-afford to alienate its Catholic subscriber base. The reporting had to be methodical and the assertions bulletproof—otherwise, the paper would be buried in hate mail and lawsuits at a time when the entire industry was starting to slip.
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