Review of Spotlight (2015) by Misadventurer — 01 Jan 2016

Spotlight isn't as good as every seems to make it out to be. it's a feature length episode of Law & Order: SVU, what it does capture well, is the casual racism of Boston. If a character isn't Irish and Catholic by default at least one person per scene, in the case of Stanley Tucci, its himself, will mention the character's race or religion, for no other reason than to question why they care about why the Catholic Church does what it does, and it's a very "outsiders cause trouble" mentality.

The performances are uneven, you get solid Keaton and Slattery, but there are no real characters for them, they're the straight men. Ruffalo's accent slips in and out of every scene, but he manages to keep it together for a big scene, standing up to Keaton, but you can't give an award for once scene when the rest of the performance is shoddy (unless its Anne Hathaway singing in a close up).

I wanted to like Rachel McAdams more in this, she has a "Your Girl Friday" attitude, but its also because she's effectively the only female character in the entire film. The most interesting performance in the film is from Brian d'Arcy James, you know, that one guy in the movie you probably have no idea who is, with the eyebrows and the mustache, that's in more of the film than Liev Schreiber, who plays the new EIC of the Boston Globe who puts the Spotlight investigative team on the Catholic Molestation case in the first place.

The film has a downer ending, and endings for Bio-Pics or based on true events films, are hard, because if you follow the news, generally you know how they're going to end, going in. With this, the article is front page of the Sunday Edition, and the film ends with post script cards telling how more than 1000 victims came forward after the article was written and then lists all the cities around the world where molestation involving the Catholic Church have taken place.

The film was produced by Participant Media, which, their mission statement is to make films that matter, and most of their films are quite good, Spotlight came off as a hollow procedural and was almost more montage than narrative.