Coming into the home stretch of the film year it gets really easy to scrutinize everything coming down the pipe. It’s a difficult time for some films, as people expect the best of the best or keep their eyes turned back on the year that was. With the words “Oscar-bait” over-zealously tossed around whenever possible, it’s a wonder films make it out alive.
It’s time to turn to the real reason for the season.
Once you can blind yourself from all the award hype that comes with big December dramas, it’s easy to stumble into some real gems.
Spotlight recalls the heroic efforts of the Boston Globe in unfurling a small part of the institutionalized sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. With the forceful urging of a new hot-shot Editor-In-Chief, special investigation team Spotlight meticulously peels back the legal and social stop-gates that have held the dark secrets of the church for ages. In the midst of a system that insisted on turning a blind eye to the travesty, the team’s efforts helped to uncover over 200 priests in the Boston area alone linked to sexual abuse of children, mostly from lower class neighborhoods. I’m not spoiling it for you; the story was published in 2002.
The point of Spotlight isn’t so much about the story on the page as the one left out. The newspaper did a journalistically marvelous job, exposing the crimes to the masses, but the film has the ability to humanize their details. The most trying and emotionally impactful scenes takes place off the paper in interviews with abuse victims, taping together broken lives and lawyers balancing the act of saving lives against doing their jobs.
It takes a pristine cast to flesh out a movie like this, and every cast member delivers definitive homeruns. The investigative team led by emotional-core Michael Keaton, consists of a sharp-witted Rachel McAdams, family oriented Brian d’Arcy James, and bluntly passionate Mark Ruffalo, all working synchronously in the distress of the situation at hand. Even the smallest supporting characters, such as the abuse victims, display an undeniable conviction highlighting the generations of emotional abuse living inside the church walls across the world.
The films ability to admonish the Catholic Church without taking all religions down with it is one of its strengths. The biggest obstacle the team faces is that the entire course of the investigation comes from supporters of the church who are willing to acknowledge wrong doing, but willing to let sleeping dogs lie, because “the church does so much good.” As the entire cast faces this ordeal, the film analyzes their religious sentiments through well-placed scenes around family dinner tables and children’s Christmas programs.
In the buzz of year-end lists and Oscar season looming on the horizon, Spotlight will receive its fair share of attention that will do everything from impress to underwhelm its audiences. It deserves better. It’s a fantastically made movie with an incredible cast showcasing the eccentricities of humanity in both a brilliant and an ugly light; the art form at its best. Without qualifications, Spotlight holds up firmly on its own two feet as one of the strongest films at the box office.
