UNITED STATES
Commonweal
Richard Alleva
December 4, 2015
Before the so-called Second Golden Age of Television was launched on cable, the one network show that captivated me (and in re-runs still does) was Law and Order, whose most curious feature was the mostly missing private lives of its regular characters. These cops and DAs pursued clues, interrogated suspects, cut deals…and never went home. The drama was strictly of the workplace. Domestic details eventually crept in but only when they were tied to the investigations and prosecutions at hand. Later, showrunner Dick Wolf created a spin-off, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, which took a different tack, immersing us in the private affairs and foibles of its heroes—so much so that the series continually tipped over into soap opera.
There is a similar contrast between two current movies, Spotlight and Truth. Both are about the splendors and miseries of journalism, and both are based on real events. Spotlight shows how the Boston Globe exposed the full extent of the sexual abuse of minors perpetrated by priests in the archdiocese of Boston. It portrays the Globe’s reporters as heroes, but theirs is a workaday heroism without flourishes or frills—no preachy monologues paying tribute to freedom of the press, no clichés of journalists jutting their jaws while righteously facing down hypocrisy and corruption. By contrast, Truth—about the downfall of Dan Rather at CBS—is soaked in personality. Specifically, the personality of Mary Mapes, Rather’s producer on 60 Minutes Wednesday. I was never sure whether the movie was urging me to lament the decline of the evening news or to weep for the misery of one nobly striving, high-strung producer.
Spotlight’s most salient virtue is a Spartan economy of storytelling that lets us lucidly follow the reporters as they track down their story. We witness the gradual discovery of horrifying crimes and an almost equally horrifying cover-up. “Spotlight” was the name of the Globe’s special investigative team, and the film shows how each member of the team had his or her special contribution to make. Some members interview victims; one tries to connect with a lawyer who was handling the lawsuits of dozens of victims; another approaches the former assistant DA who was in charge of the John Geoghan case, which led to further revelations; Spotlight’s chief, Robby Robinson, uses his friendship with a church attorney to secure facts; and the Globe’s new editor, Marty Barron, must establish some sort of relationship with Cardinal Bernard Law himself. It’s as if the many pieces of a huge jigsaw puzzle had been flung into a Boston windstorm, each piece landing in a different neighborhood. The storyline might have fragmented amid so much to-ing and fro-ing, but the script by director Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer keeps it all under control. No scene goes on too long or is cut off too soon. And despite the film’s inherently painful material, it never sinks into either sensationalism or mawkishness. The moviegoer’s intelligence is honored by the absence of stentorian music, overacting, and visual rhetoric. Spotlight is the most sinewy film I’ve seen in a long time.
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