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For more
than a decade,
America’s daily
newspapers
have faced their
own mortality.
Print circulation has plummeted nearly
50%. Ad revenue has plunged to less than
half its one-time high. Two in five newsroom
employees have been handed pink
slips, forcing many to seek work in precincts
outside the Fourth Estate.
That doesn’t exactly make a newspaper
an obvious backdrop for a movie
— or a ripe setting for praiseworthy
endeavors. Yet “Spotlight” places journalists
and the printed word shamelessly
front and center, celebrating a quiet
kind of heroism. No wonder preview
and festival audiences are chock-full of
ink-stained wretches swelling with pride
and affirmation.
But it’s not mere nostalgia that has put
director Tom McCarthy’s fifth film prominently
in the conversation for best picture
and multiple other potential honors
this awards season. What’s making
“Spotlight” the “it” movie of the moment,
even prior to its Nov. 6 theatrical debut, is
that it has pre-release audiences talking
not just about journalism and freedom of
the press, but about the Catholic Church,
Pope Francis’ stance on the plague of sexual
abuse by priests and even about the
bounds of faith.
With an ensemble cast led by Michael
Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams
and Liev Schreiber, the movie tells
the real-life story of the Boston Globe’s
four-member investigative reporting team
(aka Spotlight) which uncovered the scandal
and massive cover-up of child molestation
within the local Catholic Archdiocese
beginning in 2001.
A throwback in more than just its
setting (the Globe newsroom), the Open
Road Films production evokes filmmaking
of another era. The story is notable
for eschewing the building blocks of
today’s most popular movies — CGI pyrotechnics,
comic-book superheroes, sex
and violence.
Instead, the script, co-written by
McCarthy and Josh Singer, advances character
and plot gradually and assuredly.
“Spotlight” is a slow burn. The investigation
gets sidetracked. The journalists
are flawed. But they are the only ones in
a position to hold a powerful institution
accountable for its greatest failing. With a
monolithic adversary and children as the
victims, the filmmakers establish a powerful
rooting interest among the audience.
“Ultimately, we decided we didn’t
have the time or real estate” to focus on
the struggles of newspapers, McCarthy
says. “It would have been too editorial.
We really wanted the story to play on its
own merits.”
Adds Singer: “The best way to show the
continuing importance of journalism is
to just show great local journalism. And,
by the way, both this story and Watergate
started as great local journalism.”
“Spotlight’s” realistic evocation of highstakes
investigative reporting has drawn
comparisons to “All the President’s Men.”
Director Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 award-winning
classic about the Watergate scandal
celebrated how two young reporters
from the Washington Post, Bob Woodward
(played by Robert Redford) and Carl
Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman), helped bring
down a corrupt president.
In the four decades that have followed,
journalists have often been portrayed
as ethically or morally challenged,
as in 1987’s “Broadcast News” and 2014’s
“Nightcrawler.” The profession has fared
better when it has been pitted against
powerful, and powerfully corrupt,
institutions. Michael Mann’s “The
Insider” (1999) embraced a television
producer’s expose on Big Tobacco, while
George Clooney’s “Good Night, and Good
Luck” (2005) celebrated Edward R. Murrow’s
take-down of red-baiting Sen.
Joseph McCarthy.
Yet, with few exceptions, journalism
films have failed to break out at the
box office. Nearly four decades after its
release, “All the President’s Men” remains
the leader in the genre, with a $70 mil-
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