Spotlight (2015): Keaton, Ruffalo, Boston, Journalists, Priests

A lot of good actors in one room.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg5zSVxx9JM

word from a friend of mine who caught it at Telluride is zzzzzzz

This review has me mildly optimistic, mostly because as greatly as I was in favour of a Keaton comeback, I really disliked Birdman:

http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2015/09/telluride-15-spotlight.html#more

Except for a didactic opening scene, an Oscar-bait speech for Ruffalo in the last third, and non-descript visual sense, this was superb. Stanley Tucci gives the best performance of his career, and Keaton is much better and more intelligent than in Birdman.

this was fucking fantastic

I tend to hate this kind of Oscar-bait prestige crap but I have to admit the cast is v appealing to me

I thought this was okay but far from great. For me, the primary thing that makes All the President's Men and Zodiac so great is the narrative complexity of what's being unraveled, the false leads and criss-crossing minutiae. That just wasn't there for me here; there's widespread abuse, the priests get moved around, the church covers that up. It didn't seem like the most difficult puzzle to piece together. (I'm not trying to be insensitive to the awfulness of what happened--I'm talking about the story in terms of the film.) I liked The Station Agent and The Visitor, but they were small-scale mood pieces--McCarthy just doesn't seem like the right director for this. (Got very tired of the somber music coming in to punctuate every important moment.) I liked Schreiber, McAdams, Tucci, and Billy Crudup (three or four scenes until I realized who that was). Keaton and John Slattery were okay. Didn't like Ruffalo, and I pretty much always like him. His character seemed kind of dopey to me. Odd thing that made me laugh: someone saying "board of bar overseers," just like Milo O'Shea in The Verdict.

Good stuff

Really great.

Disagree with clemenza, thought the lack of showy mystery/procedural glitz here kept it more compelling and believable, let a very good cast get on with it. The things I disliked about Zodiac were excellently done here.

Ruffalo Oscar bait the only false note really.

Straightforward but very very good imo.

The start was a little slow and dry, but as soon as they started interviewing people, it built really well. I think lack of glitz usually makes a movie more believable, but not always more compelling; here, it was both. I didn't even mind the Ruffalo monologue too much. Great movie, would be happy to see it win Best Picture.

Peter Labuza
‏@labuzamovies
can't believe SPOTLIGHT ends with the title card "Today, we call them slow content-creators."

saw this yesterday, and i liked it, mainly for how it just rattled along so efficiently, but i also just found the whole premise really predictable. partly as i had seen the trailer so many times, which basically outlined all the key points already, but also, just because i think most people know about this subject by now. it still deserves to be told, of course, but there was just something sort of unengaged about the way it was told in the film, maybe as it isnt so much about the crimes of the catholic church, as it is about a group of journalists. even there though, as someone who loves a good news investigation movie, this just seemed to bounce along, without any real bumps to trouble you along the way. it was all just smooth sailing. no major difficulties to trip them up. no major calamities to circumvent. and not really much about any of the characters either (i can tolerate that, as this is a good old fashioned, fat free, hollywood movie that zips along to get to the conclusion, though for a movie about abuse, the only people considered to be important it seemed were the writers/lawyers etc). reminded me a bit of the room. when did dramas get so drama-free? great acting though.

I like when they ask if they can follow up with Robby's deep background source, his golf buddy, and he's like "it might be hard" like, I just went to that guy's house and burned our friendship for this story, yeah, moderate difficulty.

I thought Ruffalo's monologue wasn't that OTT, they build up to it pretty well with all the other little clues - he's married to a work widow and is presumably separated, appears to live in between dumpy apartments and worse hotel rooms, and constantly putting the job above everything else (e.g. "here's $83.00, let me use YOUR copy machine" - also this is 2001, how the hell did he pay for the cab ride after he made the copies? Are we to assume the courthouse guy didn't take his money?). He seems exactly like the type of guy who probably loses his temper on his boss and coworkers about twice a year.

can't wait for Tombot to get to Brooklyn

I'm ostensibly still scheduled to cross the date line and back on two bidness trips this year but seriously why would I watch that

you're running through the Best Picture nominees; at least Saoirse Ronan is pretty.

I didn't even realize that's what was happening

Oy McAdams is totally pretty

Loved this. Struck me that Schreiber's Marty sums up the movie: reserved, methodical, allergic to grandstanding, incredibly professional, doggedly focussed on getting the job done. It's nice that Inarritu was beaten by the polar opposite of an Inarritu movie.

I also really like the idea of insiders and outsiders. Marty's a total outsider in every sense so he just wants the story. Garabedian's Armenian so he's not in the gang either. But Robby's a relatively clubbable Boston boy who has to take down a pillar of his childhood. And when Sacha's interviewing that victim in the cafe he says "Are you from here?" Because it makes a difference. Her mother is but she isn't, so she's in both camps.

It reminded me of the only thing I liked about Black Mass - the cosy old boys' network that creates complicity between criminals and the institutions that are meant to stop them. Corey Stoll's FBI boss is very like Marty - the serious new guy who doesn't like baseball and cuts through all the romantic Boston bullshit.

This was really good, and nearly 100% driven by impeccable acting and script. Though I wished it was longer, something a little more epic akin to "Zodiac" or "The Insider," but minus the style (which I love!) of those two. Might not have been as air-tight, but might have been more meaty.

Struck me that Schreiber's Marty sums up the movie: reserved, methodical, allergic to grandstanding, incredibly professional, doggedly focussed on getting the job done.

Aside from a few built-in Oscar clips and a montage featuring children singing "Silent Night," this is OTM. Schreiber and Tucci give my favourite performances here, possibly career-bests for each of them. Ruffalo, who I usually like a lot, seemed to spend the first half of the film searching for the right note for his character, but everyone else was excellent. And while it seems like an obvious thing to praise, the film shows us victims, acknowledges them as such, and is attuned to how fucked up they are by their experiences, which automatically makes the film superior, for me, to the morally and politically dubious likes of The Wolf of Wall Street and Zero Dark Thirty.

As this movie showed, I prefer Keaton in quiet acerbic mode.

Ruffalo was really bad in this, McAdams wasn't great either

this was v competently made and thoroughly boring, ie standard Oscar-bait. Feels weird that this is a genre unto itself at this point. Kept waiting for some dramatic bit part or twist to break the tedium but it never came - the closest was maybe Tucci's speech about how you had to be an outsider to see the need for change.

Got very tired of the somber music coming in to punctuate every important moment

oh man did I hate this

hmm wasn't bored for a moment. I was irritated by Ruffalo's shouting.

This movie was fairly shouting at you from the beginning that it was never going to change gears.

Struck me that Schreiber's Marty sums up the movie: reserved, methodical, allergic to grandstanding, incredibly professional, doggedly focussed on getting the job done. It's nice that Inarritu was beaten by the polar opposite of an Inarritu movie.

aside from some good performances from reliable Keaton (subdued) and Schreiber (underused) this was really mediocre. Ruffalo was legit terrible, McAdams was underwritten and basically didn't need to be there. Not aggrieved for the god damn revenant but wow, there is no year that has existed since motion pictures came around that this would be anywhere near being one of the years better films.

I appreciated McAdams the second time; she projects the right amount of controlled empathy. I loved her scenes with Michael Cyril Creighton.

I liked this a lot

Odd thing that made me laugh: someone saying "board of bar overseers," just like Milo O'Shea in The Verdict.

― clemenza, Sunday, November 29, 2015 6:55 PM (eight months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

uh ok but thats what its called

wouldn't mind someone arguing this is the best thing to win best picture of the 2000s, hell maybe since unforgiven

btw I couldn't even finish Brooklyn

It wasn't the phrase, JC, so much as the way Milo O'Shea said it: "I'm gonna write to the board of bar overseers about you today, fella." His hamminess in that film kills me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-2jqTXKQyU

Finally saw this -- been itching at me for the last few days, maybe just all the Oscar talk. Alfred's general take -- "Except for a didactic opening scene, an Oscar-bait speech for Ruffalo in the last third, and non-descript visual sense, this was superb" -- was pretty much mine as it happened. Its downplayed sense of style did, though, maybe both hurt and helped it. Per the points re: no sense of sweep or a big "FILM!" sense throughout per All the President's Men and Zodiac, the obvious comparisons, the sense of letting the silences or the undertones carry the horror functioned quite well. Its straightforwardness, where there is no 'surprise,' instead a combined sense of relief and emotion that the lies aren't being told anymore even to oneself, reminds me of nothing so much as much of the current historical moment post-Weinstein -- it was always there, it's just now talked about. (And sensing in turn how this story unfolded in a now-already lost historical moment -- post-widespread cell phone use, pre-social media -- is quietly if unintentionally instructive.)

I hesitate re mythologizing because it's a bad idea but if Baron-as-played-by-Schrieber accurate conveys the real Baron's attitude to things then...I appreciate it in his current role. Though I kinda hope whenever his final day is he leaves it with an article bodyslamming Amazon.

Struck me that Schreiber's Marty sums up the movie: reserved, methodical, allergic to grandstanding, incredibly professional, doggedly focussed on getting the job done still looks otm, and, I suppose, what the naysayers on this thread dislike too -- grindingly focused on getting the job done.

I did appreciate how certain things were seen as axiomatic by most of the main characters, that you could sense said axioms, and that instead of being the focus or subject of something where they were either openly tested or someone had a 'change of heart,' they just continued to operate by them -- which, in my view, is pretty much how humans work. I especially appreciated how with the clues-as-such for Keaton's near-ending revelation about who buried the story earlier was neither specifically telegraphed nor made more of a thing by the movie when it did surface -- Keaton gave nothing away, keeping it totally internal until then (again, much like people are), and Schreiber just noted it and moved on.

yep, well put

finally got around to seeing this and thought it was really solid - the scene right at the end where ruffalo is leaving tucci's office and sees two little kids who have recently been abused waiting to tell tucci their stories was devastating

Popped up as I scrolled around Prime, so I watched this again--third time. I've gone from lukewarm to better, and now I'm back to lukewarm. The thing that bugs me most is Mark Ruffalo, otherwise one of my favourite actors for Zodiac, You Can Count on Me, and a couple of other roles. I find him so weird here--affectatious and almost dopy. And as I mentioned in my initial post six years ago, the procedural part of this--piecing together the story--is just so basic.

Weird, I just watched this yesterday as well and bookmarked this thread.
Admittedly I'm a sucker for procedural stuff but I think the 'basic'-ness of it is... kind of the point? There wasn't really any smoking gun, everyone knew a piece of what was going on, the one priest shown didn't deny it, it's going on, all the time, and why isn't anyone stopping it when there are mechanisms to do so? (Actually this would have been a good direction to have gone stronger on in the movie - there's lots of 'don't cross the church' but I think it's kind of vague and in the end they did and presumably no-one got "fair game"-d?)

I think keatons social scenes do tbh serve this function very well but plenty itt seem not to have gotten what i did from them

I think the 'basic'-ness of it is... kind of the point?

I know, and I feel silly complaining about it--it's kind of a banality-of-evil story, captured best by the one ex-priest who shrugs his shoulders and says "Yeah, I did, but I wasn't gratified."

Nonetheless, it just doesn't compel me the way Zodiac and All the President's Men do.

Sorry, you mentioned the priest yourself.

The most harrowing account of the same subject matter I've ever seen is the Canadian film The Boys of St. Vincent.

I didn't like how there was so much focus on the journalists uncovering the story, rather than the actual story itself. I thought it was especially jarring considering the subject matter.

I've also rewatched Zodiac and ATPM fairly recently, and they are excellent - far more engaging for sure.
I think I just appreciate when, on occasion, information recounting events is relayed in a nice straightforward way without unnecessary twists or forced peril - but then again I can't really imagine rewatching it for any reason.

xp Good point. i guess there were so many victims. The bit about many no longer being around stuck with me.

Its a movie about the journalists and the structure within which the people in the story might actually be implicit to whatever degree in an ongoing issue of this type

And whatever about ones appetite for drama, ATPM and Zodiac are not that, they are classic flashy outsider "why isnt everyone a pure genius railing against this system like me, man!?" tales

That one wins out and one fades away frustrated in the end doesn't change that neither asks the questions spotlight does

Thought this was bumped because Phil Saviano, the first victim to speak up to the Globe, passed away on Sunday.

Watching again (its a good quiet night half watch) and the supporting/incidental cast are really exceptional in this

This is getting the Michael Clayton revivalism.

Keaton in this is Keaton-acting in birdman tho, hes bad

wait I'm confused -- he's bad in Spotlight?

This is getting the Michael Clayton revivalism.

― Max Hamburgers (Eric H.),

Middlebrow approval suddenly leaks down to hip level?

Yeah i think hes up and down in this, sometimes in tune and sometimes full of acting swagger

xp yeah, more or less

Keaton and the rest are fine because McCarthy largely sticks to the Bresson dictum of don't-act-behave.

Mark Ruffalo is the apostate.

Id have agreed with that on previous viewings

This time ruffalo is agreeable and keaton is less so