Movie of the Week: Spotlight

Alexa: I’m a former newspaper journalist, and I’ve always been fascinated by the portrayal of the profession in popular culture. “Spotlight” is hands down the best modern journalism movie I’ve ever seen. It’s an impeccably executed film in its own right, and its depiction of investigative journalism is among the most accurate I’ve seen onscreen. The film follows the Spotlight investigative team at The Boston Globe in the early 2000s and their work to expose the Boston Archdiocese’s attempts to cover up ongoing child sex abuse by Catholic priests in the area. The movie doesn’t embellish the job with overly dramatic monologues or unnecessary action sequences. It’s all developing relationships with sources, poring through documents and making connections, fighting for access to public records and fact checking. It’s a refreshingly no-frills approach to journalism movies, and the stakes still feel high. Tackling systemic injustice head-on is just as pressing today as it was in 2002. And in the current age of heightened distrust of (and in some notable cases, brazen belligerence toward) the media, “Spotlight” illustrates what good journalism looks like and why it’s so vital to our society.

Joel: Movies love to skip over the boring parts of life. This whole house has to be clean before mom gets home? That will take hours! Or just one quick montage set to a three minute pop song. You need to pull an all nighter to study for a test? Oh the movie just skips that part. It’s the next morning now and you’re all studied up. Journalism movies tend to do this with the research part. Either it’s condensed into a quick collection of shots giving us the highlights, or it’s skipped over entirely. Spotlight goes in the other direction by making the research the main focus of the story, and figuring out a way to make the boring parts interesting.

Investigative journalism can be a tedious process. There’s an almost overwhelming amount of research, chasing down leads, connecting the dots from one interview to another, and then realizing you’re taking the story in the wrong direction and backing up to the beginning and starting over. It’s easy to see why a movie would be tempted to skip over this part, but Spotlight focuses on the tireless research that went into the investigation done by the Boston Globe into the sex abuse scandal of the Catholic church. And in doing so it’s easy to feel the frustrations of the reporters the movie follows. We know, because the events of the film to place several years ago, that the reporters are onto something, and we know when they’re on the right track. But without proof, and with each dead end, we feel the frustration the characters are feeling knowing that they can’t print the story that needs to be printed when they don’t have the proof. On the flip side, we get the experience the joy and excitement when a hunch pays off or a reporter makes a breakthrough. The movie feels slow paced and sometimes frustratingly uneventful, but that’s intentional and it manages to do that without ever feeling boring or uninspired. The feel of the movie works perfectly as it keeps us with the reporters every step of the way. It attaches your emotions to those of the characters as perfectly as any movie in recent memory.

Chris: This film is necessary, every aspect of it. From a storytelling aspect, the movie is a grind with countless dead end leads and monotonous grunt work but it's necessary to put the audience through that for the emotional payoff in the end. From a societal front, the film is necessary to depict journalism in it's true purpose, to shine a light on what's going on that the population needs to know. It takes a lot of bravery to go up against an well-protected establishment that is both covering up terrible things their people did and covering up their inability to fix the problem in-house. This isn't a movie that's going to be entertaining or a carefree enjoyable ride but it is an important story of people determined to do right even to their own personal and professional detriment.

Jason: I had a really hard time focusing on this movie. These “based on real events” scandal movies just aren’t my cup of tea. Not that I didn’t care about the story. The idea that this was even a thing that actually happened is sickening. I just didn’t find anything in here to really grab ont. I feel like I mention the amazing casting a lot, and we do watch a lot of movies with real star power. But as often as I say it, it always comes down to “I loved the cast but I just couldn’t get behind the story.” Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Stanley Tucci, what more could I ask for? But I know little to nothing about journalism and even less about the inner workings of the Catholic church. The back and forth of conversations filled with legalese and newspaper jargon totally lost my interest. It was a well put together movie. Shot well, good natural dialog (when I understood what they were talking about), and some real emotion coming from the players. I just really found myself not caring...