UNITED STATES
Pacific Sun
by David Templeton
“It’s an American tragedy, plain and simple.”
On opening night of the Mill Valley Film Festival, director Tom McCarthy peers, spotlight-blinded, into the audience at the crammed-to-the-limit Cinéarts Sequoia theater, in Mill Valley. The audience has just watched a special advance screening of McCarthy’s Spotlight, a riveting, expertly crafted drama about The Boston Globe reporters who cracked the case in 2001, shining a different kind of spotlight onto the Catholic Church’s now infamous cover-up of 70 Boston priests accused, in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, of serial child molestation and other abuses.
The film features bravura performances by Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, Stanley Tucci and Billy Crudup. With Spotlight, McCarthy—who premiered his critically acclaimed The Station Agent at the festival in 2003—beautifully rebounds from the mega-disaster of last year’s The Cobbler, an Adam Sandler comedy so badly calibrated it made people wonder why McCarthy wanted anything to do with it.
Judging from the audience’s emotional, thunderous reception to Spotlight, all is clearly forgiven, and over the course of a quick, 10-minute conversation after the film, it’s clear that the film will be sparking similar conversations all over the country when it is released to the public in mid-November.
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