Spotlight: Trying to Tell the Truth

2015 best picture winner Spotlight struggles at finding a voice, or a reason for existing at all.

2015’s Best Picture winner Spotlight is as much documentary as it is narrative drama. With its drab Boston brought to death with muted beiges and blues, minimal character development and dormant cinematography, this film is heavy on plot, light on nearly everything else. The camera stands still in wide to capture our one dimensional caricatures chatting in their storage room of an office, making me wonder when the director will ask a question as we cut to the talking heads. Speaking outside of the fantastic performances making the most out of a script with a meandering first half, there is little present in Spotlight to capture the audience’s attention…that is, except for the journalistic subject at its core. 

Spotlight is a bland story about one of the most interestingly vile in human history. Tack on a few Hollywood hot shots and you have the outline for a generic best picture winner. Despite this award, I still find it difficult to find much value in Spotlight for my aforementioned criticisms, but more significantly, its politics. 

Following the Spotlight crew at the Boston Globe, the film tracks the team slowly revealing the corruption of the deeply rooted Bostonian church and its history of peadophelia. The case was revolutionary, so much so that the church’s crimes against humanity is now essentially common knowledge. With a story so impactful that it breaks into the cultural zeitgeist, how could it not be at the center of a successful prestige drama? The answer reveals itself when the film takes over half its runtime to vary its sluggish pacing and numbing shots of “x character pacing to y location:” the printed story was interesting, the story about printing the story is not. While subjective, I point to the character’s as my main reasoning for this claim, as they are all husks half full of shallow emotion with little to no interesting backstory or development. Meaning, the focus is on the labyrinthian chase for the truth, and as a result, the film’s purpose is redefined. WIth no longer being able to lay claim to its existence as being a “character study,” Spotlight focuses its attention on the thrill of the hunt where the thrill is, again, visualized by Rachel McAdams pacing to the same, droning theme.  

I do not criticize just to spew more hate in the world, but rather to arrive at my main point: Spotlight is a movie that utterly fails at convincing the audience of the film’s existence. If the film’s characters provide no reason to remain invested, if the “edge of your seat” plot fails to teeter your rump on the border, if the most interesting part of the film is a story that anyone could read online and is already aware of its results, then why watch the film? What does Spotlight add to this story that, in real life, is interesting, but is seemingly unfit for narrative drama? 

Liberal politics. And I do not mean this term in a condescending attack on the left, but rather for its second life of a definition. See, in an attempt at adding anything to the should be documentary, Spotlight injects nuance into the plot by not just attacking the church, as is inevitable with this film’s premise, but the network of institutions that allowed for the church to execute its sadistic desires. This was shocking. While watching with a fear of boredom quickly building in my chest, I was recentered into the film when it was revealed that Eric Macleish, a lawyer with a history of representing the church, sent key evidence to the Boston Globe years prior, evidence that would have exposed the church’s tendrils poisoning Boston. Suddenly, Spotlight was not a slog due to its direct recreation of reality, but risky in its messaging. Now the conflict was not surrounding a story already told and consumed by our culture, but a sprawling web of mysteries and questions that draws the audience in on the basis of “who is the real bad guy?” 

Turns out, it’s the church. Shocker.

Before the film’s conclusion, and after many examples of implied corruption within the newspaper industry, even the very office in which the group occupies, Spotlight doubles back on its sole interesting element. From a coworker acting suspicious during a drunken daze to the mention of a fabled employee who purposefully hid key evidence to a few questionable lawyers, Spotlight was priming the audience for a reveal so entwined with interesting politics and nuanced criticism that it would finally give this film a reason for existing. However, the reveal is less of an explosion, more of a firecracker that fails to spark. In the final minutes, only a day before the story is published, Michael Keaton’s Water is shown to have been the employee that mishandled the damning evidence against the church all those years ago. The crowd gasps, the hero is the villain all along, what a shock! Except, he isn’t the villain. None of them are. Despite the fact that it was this very company, by the hands of people in that very room, that countless amounts of victims were subjugated to acts of sexual horror, Baron, Spotlight’s new boss, excuses this mistake (as if it can be called anything less than terrifying consequence of human error). And it is with this line, with this dismissal of the paper’s involvement in a network of corruption, that Spotlight becomes a truly pointless film. No longer does the film’s politics have anything of note to say with valid and fresh criticisms of the newspaper industry, or the ways in which it interacts with corrupt institutions. No longer is Robby a character dripping with nuance, but rather one shriveled up from the depth being sucked out of him with a single line. With this new found information and the resulting quick dismissal of it, Spotlight is a movie about a story more interesting than its own plot with action figures for characters, and add to the list, one lacking any new, meaningful messages or themes. The film sets itself apart from others by attacking the various institutions involved with the case, only to pull its punches when it matters most. Instead of a gray outlook on a multi-layered situation, Spotlight reduces itself to nothing by pointing to the church and defining it as the sole villain. Meaning, it is clear Spotlight never intended on legitimizing its own claims against the industry, lest it may fail to be the Boston Globe’s 2015 film of the year. Whether to make it more digestible for large audiences at, say, a prestige award show or a masochistic drive to make one’s own film worse, Spotlight fails to individualize itself via its politics or messaging, and by extension, fails to be a worthwhile movie.

Meaning, I simply see no reason for Spotlight as a film in its current state, to even exist. If one designs flat characters in a film directly recreating reality about developing a story the audience is already aware of through a generic plot, bland visuals and dull writing only for it to zip its mouth closed on the single interesting point it had to say…then the narrative drama comes concerningly close to a bad documentary. By excusing the individuals and institutions of their mistakes, Spotlight loses the nuance that would have given this dying film life. Instead, Spotlight remains as my personal Oscar blemish in recent years, undeserving of the award not just on a basis of boredom, but on investigative journalistic integrity. What happened to telling the truth?