UNITED STATES
Mediaite
by Joe Concha December 6th, 2015
If there was ever a weekend to escape the horrible reality our world and country has become in light of the mass killings in San Bernardino and Colorado Springs before it, this may be as good as any. And for me, that escape usual means a trip to the local movie theatre.
Those trips used to happen much more often as a single guy living in Hoboken, NJ. Wife, two kids and a dog in the suburbs? Not so much. So when that trek to the cinema does happen, the movie better damn well be worth the time. Painfully selective is how the wife deems the process. She’s not much of a buff, and it’s the one area she has 100 percent confidence in my ability to choose a winner, particularly films of the underrated variety (The Debt, Blood Diamond, The Pursuit of Happyness, Friends with Kids and The Prestige are my tops of the past decade). But if we’re talking about a movie that absolutely isn’t underrated but isn’t making much at the box office (only about $15 million despite a wide release over two weeks ago), Spotlight is the best journalism-themed movie since The Insider (Pacino, Crowe), arguably the best of all-time if removing All the President’s Men (Redford, Hoffman) from the equation, and easily, easily the best offering of any genre this year.
Spotlight takes place largely in 2001 Boston and centers on the meticulous, careful, tireless investigative efforts that went into the the Boston Globe’s exposé of clergy sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. Note: Director Tom McCarthy could have gone two ways in crafting the narrative: Focus on the investigative aspect and all the challenges the Globe’s “Spotlight” team had to overcome in being completely, unquestionably accurate before going to press, or use the investigation and its findings to pontificate some kind of bigger, darker message about the Catholic Church or religion in general.
And like The Insider (the mesmerizing true story of a 60 Minutes report–or modified report–about a big tobacco whistle-blower) and All the President’s Men (the must-see story behind Woodward and Bernstein blowing the lid off of Watergate), McCarthy avoids being self-righteous about the transgressions exposed and the entity that allowed it. Instead, it keeps the focus squarely on the behind the scenes battles and politics that are prevalent in newsrooms, along with the business aspect of journalism in general.
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