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: The Fifth Estate (2013)

Following the final two Twilight films with a topical, controversial and political film about WikiLeaks – the first fiction feature about Assange and his whistleblower website – should seem odd. However, anyone who can make anything halfway conventional out of the downright bizarre final instalment of the “Twilight” books is a safe pair of hands, and Bill Condon’s treatment of the WikiLeaks story seems, therefore, to be more a story of resistance, grey-area ethics and mutual recrimination than anything particularly polemical or rebellious – though it may work as an introduction for anyone who prefers their head in the sand.

In Berlin in 2007, Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch), the founder of a small website that offers to publish whistleblower information with full anonymity for the whistleblower, meets Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl) and is almost immediately taken by him. They dedicate themselves to making WikiLeaks the infamous and influential website that it would become. However, from the start, Domscheit-Berg is kept disconcertingly out of the loop. Meanwhile, Assange is moving further and further into uncharted territory, putting them both in danger.

The film is based partly on the book, “Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website” by Domscheit-Berg himself. This, and the reticence of Assange himself, makes the film feel one-sided with a hint of character assassination. The air of mystery that the film shrouds around Assange hinders Cumberbatch’s performance – his unknowability and unclear motivations leads to a vague central performance. Assange is ultimately a figure both heroic and villainous and a film made with such a Hollywood framework is unable to find any middle ground. It ends up with two extremes – where one grateful woman tells Assange that if he had been around during the Cold War the Berlin Wall would have fallen much sooner while we also see him as working primarily for himself. The film ends sharply on the latter point, with a line intentionally comic, but also, in a way, dismissive.

There are a lot of flashbacks and backstory given concerning Assange, which, given that the film will ultimately throw up its hands in seeming exasperation at the truth of Assange’s character, are rather unnecessary. They do not reveal much in particular, leaving a conventional tale about two friends with big ideas falling out – not unlike, say, The Social Network, another film with a lot of people looking at laptop screens though a lot less awkwardly. Condon seems to have attempted to pre-empt such criticisms with a series of flashy cuts and a dreamscape of The Crowd-style computers, each an alias for Assange, all utilised in an effort to explain hacking in what feel like simple terms. Otherwise, the film feels a little too tightly structured, with the complicated real world story twisted into a three-act structure, aided and abetted with lines like, “If you are going to put yourself on a cross, you should first find out what it is made of.” All of this distracts from the real meat of the story, the central issue that anything about WikiLeaks must address.

The central issue, and one that the film takes a long time getting to, is whether or not Assange should have released Bradley Manning’s leaked files with redactions in order to protect certain people from reprisals. Fairly conventionally, the film opts for an easy answer – Yes – with little debate, offering only ethics as the determining factor. This despite clearly showing the importance of full disclosure elsewhere, when revealing the vicious murder of civilians in Baghdad and subsequent cover-up perpetrated by US forces. Although The Fifth Estate does not choose the wrong answer to the above question, it does nevertheless offer simplistic, fairly conservative ones. It seemingly suggests that WikiLeaks’ exposures are justified as long as they are not too damaging to the US, that anything diplomatically survivable is fair game but anything too horrendous is best left under wraps. In typical Hollywood fashion, a complex question is represented with a definitive answer, a happy ending of justice done and full closure – if not full disclosure.

Having said that, The Fifth Estate remains somewhat nice to see, a further American film showing real world dissent – Batmanglij’s The East  is another recent example. Though neither are fully committed to anything too radical or risky and both opts for easy cop-outs, they are nevertheless films that recognise a prevalent villainy within the American establishment. The Fifth Estate is ultimately too safe, too apologetic – the sympathetically drawn State Department official Sarah Shaw’s (Laura Linney) point that “if you don’t want dirty pictures, don’t have dirty wars” is remarkably feeble since it suggests that the USA is justified in causing as much ‘collateral’ damage as it wants and, worse still, that the dirty war was somehow ‘wanted.’ Nevertheless, a wide audience for a film like The Fifth Estate may be a good thing, especially if it enrages and leads to further reading. As likely as this may or may not be, the fact remains that, The Fifth Estate is just not angry enough.