Spotlight

Spotlight's journalists-uncover-major-scandal-and-it's-all-based-on-a-true-story premise inevitably reminds of All The President's Men, although Spotlight's topic is the altogether murkier, skin-crawling and vein-popping anger-inducing uncovering of the widespread, decades-long issue of Catholic priests abusing children within their parishes - and the subsequent cover-up of this by the Church's most senior authorities, on many occasions simply allowing the priests to be moved to another area (and therefore giving complicit approval for the abuse to carry on until it looked as though the whistle would be blown again). No funny Watergate and Tricky Dicky Nixon style jokes to be had from this one, then.

However, despite the stomach-churning details of Spotlight being the sort of subject that might get me marching up and down in front of my local church waving protesting placards and the like on a  particularly energetic day, director Tom McCarthy and screenwriter Josh Singer wisely decide to sidestep overblown emotion, tears, and histrionics for a straightforward re-telling of how the Spotlight investigative team at the Boston Globe blew the lid off the scandal in the early 2000's as they pieced together various anecdotes, documented evidence, victim testimonies and more and eventually went on to claim the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2003. The small, uncomfortable details of the abuse as revealed by a range of differing victims is enough to make us squirm and feel uncomfortable; what is equally shocking is the numbers and scale of the cover-up - hearing it re-iterated again here in stark fact drills home the sheer horror of the situation, the arrogance and audacity of those in positions of power who abused the trust of their communities, and the complicity of the wider community in turning a blind eye to such a repugnant and widespread scandal.

From a cinematic point-of-view, Spotlight does not try any spectacular tricks or effects in order to tell its rather grim story - and I thought that to do so would feel rather like a disservice to many of the surviving victims of the abuse. Instead it gets on with its business coolly and unfussily, drawing us in with both revulsion and fascination after a fairly slow opening 15 minutes and eventually gripping us as the team peel back further layers of corruption and appalling behaviour by those 'in the know' - in this sense, it's rather like a well-written broadsheet journalistic piece- not intended to win prizes for its style and showiness, but drawing us in with facts and an overwhelming urge to find out just what happens in the end - the lure of the headline (often gruesome, equally often compelling) pushing us on to read more.

The ensemble cast is uniformly excellent, and McCarthy smartly does not depict any of them as superheroes or guardians of journalistic morality and integrity, just a bunch of normal people trying to do their jobs and get the truth out there. I was particularly impressed with the work of Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams, who brings her usual warmth, likeability and underrated acting skills to the role of Sacha Pfeiffer - it's a shame that her unshowy part didn't stand a chance in the Supporting Actress Oscar category this year against Alicia Vikander in a role for The Danish Girl that clearly should have been nominated as lead.

Well-crafted, straightforward, to-the-point and quietly powerful, Spotlight's beating of The Revenant to the Best Picture Oscar this year may have surprised many, but it is by no means an unworthy winner.