REVIEW: Spotlight (2016)

Any film about investigative journalists will always have to survive a comparison with All The President’s Men – not least Spotlight, which features Ben Bradlee Jr, as played by John Slattery. Where other films revel in a clash between heroes and villains, Spotlight is a lot more subtle and a lot more engrossing.

Spotlight follows a group of investigative journalists for the Boston Globe as they uncover a huge scandal within the Boston establishment, which ends up uncovering a history of abuse inside the Roman Catholic Church on a global scale. The focus of the film is less on the crimes themselves, but more the efforts to uncover them. The team breaks into different tasks, each developing an element of this tightly constructed film’s chief target. Walter Robinson (Michael Keaton) battles an establishment who would prefer that the story go away, while Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) chases the evidence and a seemingly doomed victim’s lawsuit headed by embattled and disgruntled lawyer Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci). Meanwhile, Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) tracks down and interviews some victims.

After one film in which the filmmakers toned down their own material and another in which a filmmaker openly did not trust his own material, it is a relief to see a film of such confidence and skill.  Spotlight is as much a procedural as anything else, a slow burner that is nonetheless engrossing, not unlike, apologies, All The President’s Men. Every stumbling block and sudden revelation that comes Rezendes’ way is dramatic and interesting and Ruffalo runs around gamely. But the film is most disturbing when it tackles the ways in which the conspiracy of silence is maintained – decent men who suggest that there is nothing in the story, keeping the voices low so their wives don’t hear. There is even a mystery in the film as it is revealed that someone on the paper suppressed evidence of the abuse years ago. This, however, is not played up as a twist, but more as a disturbing and subtle portrayal of how easily the Church was able to get away with it for so long.

The film is not about the victims, though scenes of Pfeiffer interviewing some victims are presented with tact and respect. It is a film about investigative journalism and the ease with which the status quo can be maintained in the face of systematic abuse. The film dabbles with the tropes of the conspiracy thriller. Richard Jenkins plays Richard Snipe, an ex-priest and psychotherapist who states, chillingly, that the abuse is endemic within the priesthood, who is never seen and only heard through a telephone – being this film’s Deep Throat (another comparison). We frequently see shots of the homes of the victims with a massive church steeple towering imposingly over them – hardly subtle, but undeniably effective. One scene, in which a retired priest gladly admits his crimes to Pfeiffer, is as close as the film gets to thrilling, and it is nail-biting. Equally, the power of the Church, the resources they have to fight back, the good old men who are on their side, the silence and disinterest of the parties that should have revealed everything and the sheer scale of the abuse (shown starkly at the close of the film in a long list) give the film a sense of eeriness and danger.

Tom McCarthy, who played a journalist a lot less troubled by integrity in The Wire, films tightly and confidently. Spotlight is a rare film that relies on its material without fear or the misguided belief that the audience will understand the film better with an over the top score, a recognisable villain, a false dramatic arc. Indeed, the film doesn’t really have a villain and there is little in the film that is directly threatening, but that is what the best investigative journalism is – a chase, requiring patience and integrity, but in the end revealing something about all of us. Indeed, anger is ultimately not the film’s response, more a stunned sadness. What is ultimately so sobering about Spotlight in its representation of how the Church’s crimes were revealed, is how it took so long for the cover-up to break. Spotlight is as much a tribute to good journalism as it a warning about the secrecy and silence that surrounds any powerful social organisation.

REVIEW: To The Wonder (2013)

One of the categories that might define ‘great art’ may well be that the work cannot be adapted into another medium without losing that which makes it great. For example, A Woman Under The Influence would lose the raw immediacy and tenderness of Cassavetes’ camera, Jeux Interdits would severely miss the remarkable expressiveness of the then five-year old Brigitte Fossey (oddly, I balk at calling these two ‘art’ since they both seem much more important than that), Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” would be less intangible, less unknowably beautiful. A second category follows - that they are almost impossible to accurately review.

To The Wonder ought to be ‘great art’ then. Though every shot is an award-winning photograph, it is not photography. It certainly isn’t philosophy as it is a lot less pointed than that – in other places, Terrence Malick has been described thoroughly unhelpfully as a ‘mystic.’ A novel or a poem would collapse under the strain of revealing the beauty of the natural world as imaginatively yet truthfully as film. To The Wonder makes such excellent use of classic music that it would be less powerful without it, however music alone would not suffice. To The Wonder is essential cinema precisely because it is essential that it be cinema. Similarly, it will lose a lot of its potency off the big screen.

To The Wonder is also nearly impossible to write about, though Nick Pinkerton makes a much better effort at it. To The Wonder defies interpretation since any single meaning that might be uncovered is reductive. Any description of an image and its meaning is only a pale comparison to watching the film itself. It is a difficult watch, but then a lot of ‘great art’ is not something that can be flicked on and passively understood. To The Wonder requires patience and a certain fluidity in the viewer, a willingness to engage with the film sincerely and without embarrassment. Something that would otherwise be mawkish or annoying (like in Malick’s previous, The Tree of Life, there is a lot of dancing) is, in Malick’s cinema, celebratory and free. To The Wonder will not be for everyone, but those who are open to it might find that they come out of the cinema a little different than when they went in. The plot can only be understood by implication just as the film can only be appreciated by thought, the drawing of links with one’s own life and an acknowledgment of its lyrical and visual beauty.

Neil (Ben Affleck) is in a relationship with Marina (Olga Kurylenko). When she returns to France, her home country, Neil gets into a relationship with childhood friend Jane (Rachel McAdams), but when Marina returns, he goes back to her. Meanwhile, Father Quintana (Javier Bardem) struggles with his inability to find God. To The Wonder is most obviously about searching for an understanding of something that is beyond human knowledge. Marina and Jane both try to capture an eternal happiness with a reticent Neil, who comes out of his shell only rarely. Ultimately, they are looking for love, while Father Quintana tries to find proof of God’s existence. This bare plot is then used, by Malick, to explore the world in a way rarely seen. At one point, it feels as if Malick has proved the existence of God by filming sunlight illuminating a garden fence – an entirely personal reading that, very probably, no one will agree with. The characters are ultimately either successful or not, their prize being acceptance. Father Quintana seems to find God or at least to become happy with the search. Marina’s mood varies – she might see a reason for being in an interaction with a flock of migrating birds yet she can still be in the depths of despair in a scenic field surrounded by horses. The return to Mont Saint-Michel, which Neil and Marina visit at the beginning of the film, suggests less a regression or a fondly held memory of better times, but a sign of hope and of constant renewal – Malick presents some beautiful footage of the oncoming tide that surrounds Mont Saint-Michel. The film finishes here, but it is not a conclusion.

To The Wonder is achingly beautiful, embarrassingly unironic and totally sincere. Terrence Malick is a brave filmmaker, because some many people find it too easy to laugh at his films and many more will merely turn away, bored out of their mind. To The Wonder might be his most divisive film, but it is also one of his best. For others, it might take a period of weeks or months before they have totally made their mind up about the film only, I suspect, for a second viewing to open up whole new avenues of thought. For me, since one’s response to Malick’s cinema can only be personal, To The Wonder is a film to cherish and one to watch many, many more times.

REVIEW: Midnight In Paris (2011)

  Midnight In Paris is this year’s Woody Allen film in which Owen Wilson takes the role Allen is now too old to play. It is a light comedy full of quietly funny scenes and a fantastical premise that it is best not to know anything about going in.

  Owen Wilson plays Gil Pender, a successful Hollywood hack writer who wants to drop everything and move to Paris and work on his first novel. He is also deeply nostalgic for 1920s Paris. His fiancé Inez (Rachel McAdams) would rather that he grow up and embrace success and modernity. Choosing to forgo the many social engagements that Inez tries to drag him into, Gil prefers to wander the streets of Paris where, on the stroke of midnight, something odd happens.

  The phrase ‘return to form’ has been used with each subsequent Allen film since 2008’s fantastic Vicky Christina Barcelona; but the truth is that it hasn’t been a bad decade for the prolific writer-director. With Small Time Crooks, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion and Scoop to the more recent Whatever Works and You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, Allen has made a collection of pleasantly surprising, and often funny, films, whether light or dark in tone. With Midnight In Paris, it is made abundantly clear that he has cornered the market in cheerfully breezy comedies, held together by good, amusing ideas. He doesn’t waste time delving into the intricacies of his fantasy plot, to the point that Gil very quickly accepts the strange environment in which he finds himself. Allen isn’t interested in whether this could actually happen. What concerns him, like in his much earlier Sleeper, is working with the idea he has and developing it in several unexpected but very pleasing ways. To use any of them as examples would be to ruin the fun but, for the sake of critical analysis, they are, for example, the PI’s unfortunate wrong turning and Luis Buñuel’s inability to understand Gil’s movie idea as well as Michael Sheen’s arrogant Paul, Adrien Brody’s Dali or Corey Stoll’s mad, almost unblinking Hemingway. This list could go on and on.

  This light tone pervades the film, even in the rather long opening montage of Paris, which shows the city from morning until night. It will no doubt have many critics sneering at the tourist’s eye view of Paris, but it fits the mood of the film absolutely. After all, the film is about a tourist celebrating his idea of Paris, as well as the worth of nostalgia and whether or not it is merely a denial of the present.

  Though it does deal with a variety of neuroses, it is a film to enjoy and not to take seriously. Ultimately, light-hearted Woody Allen films fall out of a lot of critical criteria because of their whimsical nature. They are not like other films. They are simple little films which don’t take themselves too seriously and which don’t ask you to either. They have their flaws but, in the end, they are little joys filled with great performances and well-used music.