"Spotlight": Unsettling Societal Introspection At Its Finest

Now In Theaters

It’s easy to be skeptical of a film like Spotlight.  Often when a film receives such universal acclaim and is also in the wheelhouse of Oscar-baiting tropes, such as adapting a barely decade-old event into a “true story” feature, it is easy to see how eyes can glaze over and awards can be handed out purely out of instinct and habit.  That isn’t to say that a film that fits this mold is usually bad, but its flaws are generally ignored in favor of elevating it above genre flicks that may have been of superior quality.  However, that isn’t what’s happening with Spotlight.  This is an honest-to-goodness amazing piece of filmmaking that will deservedly be recognized as one of the best of the year.

In January 2002, the Boston Globe exposed the Catholic Church’s protection and sheltering of pedophilic priests within its ranks.  Spotlight is the story of the eponymous team that pursued that investigation in the preceding year, tracking down survivors, finding out about more and more priests involved at an exponential rate, and coming to terms with how the Boston community turned a blind eye to these events in favor of preserving the Church’s status quo.

At first, I was a bit off-put by the fact that there were no stand-out performances in this film, no lead to latch on to in order to act as an audience surrogate.  But before long I realized that this wasn’t meant to be a film about a lone hero or even a single antagonist, but a film about people who have to come to terms with what is simultaneously the best and worst kept secret of their community.  No performance stands out because they are all necessarily excellent, from Michael Keaton as the Spotlight team’s increasingly disturbed editor, to Rachel McAdams effortless portrayal of a woman in a male-dominated field, to a slightly neurotic turn by Mark Ruffalo that is deserving of a Best Supporting Actor nomination.  There are numerous others, both in large and small roles, but the entire film pulsates with realistic human emotion and a staggering sense of community between them.

And that sense of community may be the most tragic element to this story, as the film so masterfully portrays.  Instead of veering into cliché and melodrama by making the Catholic Church into a monolithic entity of control and manipulation (though elements of that are definitely present in its portrayal), Spotlight instead opts to focus on how so many key players in Boston institutions had knowledge of the systemic rape of children, and yet nobody opted to do anything about it, or those that did choose to speak up were not acknowledged, even by the news institution that was now putting the pieces together.  Relatedly, there is a fantastic red herring subplot that I will not spoil, but the reveal is so casual that the gut-punch twist is all the more effective because of it.

The film ends on a disquieting note just after the article is published and leaves an unsettling question mark over the future of Boston and its (and the world’s) relationship with the Catholic Church.  This isn’t a film that begs for resolution, but rather asks us to examine ourselves and our communities and whether the perceived benefits of the status quo are worth the secrets we sweep under the rug to preserve it.  This is masterwork filmmaking and I will be most pleased to see this film’s inevitable Oscar nominations.

"San Andreas": Failing the Art of Disaster Film-Making

Now Available on DVD and Blu-ray

Despite appearances to the contrary, there is a certain amount of artistry that goes into making a natural catastrophe film.  It isn’t all about special effects and watching destruction happen en masse, though that is a major component of it.  In addition, though, there needs to be a human element that relates the disaster to the struggles and tribulations of a cast of characters that, while not necessarily deep, need to be relatable so that the audience can feel their fear and tension through the characters.  This is what San Andreas is so desperately trying to do, but lacks the technical skill to pull off gracefully.

The catastrophe in question is a massive fissure that is working its way along the San Andreas Fault, causing the largest earthquakes in recorded history.  Our audience surrogates for this film are Ray (Dwayne Johnson, as generically likeable as ever), his estranged wife Emma, his daughter Blake, and Ben and Ollie, a couple of British boys who get trapped with Blake when the quakes start happening. 

The family has personal drama stemming from the death of their eldest daughter in a time before the film’s events, and it uses the family’s internal turmoil to act as a mirror to the external turmoil of the catastrophic events around them.  This normally would be a perfectly fine bit of theming and motif work, but the film couches itself into a most tired cliché of the tortured patriarch needing to prove himself to an inept female family.  There is an argument to be made that Blake is a strong female presence in the film, acting as a de facto leader when her father is not around, but her entire survival strategy revolves around her father eventually coming to save her.  And Ray is such a superman of a father figure that he never has any visible trouble overcoming the obstacles the continuing natural disaster throws his way, any potential for self-doubt overcome by singular determinism.  Factor in that Emma’s only emotional responses seem to be worry for her daughter’s safety and swooning over Ray, and you have a cast of archetypes so broad as to be entirely unrelatable, and all tension fizzles out of the film.

It also doesn’t help that the visual effects of this film never quite sell the destruction they purport to represent.  The scale of the CGI modeling is impressive, but the way the buildings are rendered feels too clean and polished, creating a layer of surreality that acts as a constant reminder that what you are watching is a computer simulation.  The film also doesn’t do a great job of relating the catastrophic landscape shots to the close-ups of the characters’ turmoil.  A near-complete absence of wide shots separates the film into two realities wherein a chaos rages outside and a more personal dilemma follows the characters; a cause and effect relationship is there, but it is minimal, as the destruction of notable California architecture doesn’t carry the same weight as the millions of lives theoretically lost that the film neglects to show or allude to.

San Andreas clearly isn’t an ambitious film, seeking only to fill the catastrophe movie niche in a year that appears to be otherwise lacking in a film.  It has a likeable star, a barebones plot, and enough special effects to ensure a large enough audience to make its money back.  It was an early summer theatrical diversion that will soon be forgotten in the annals of history, so it’s not really that big of a deal that it’s not a very good film.  But a good film it still certainly is not, so if you find yourself tempted to give this one a look, I advise against it.  There are better ways to spend your time and money.

"Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief": Intensely Eye-Opening

Now Available on DVD and Blu-ray

What is perhaps the most amazing thing about Going Clear is that, from the original book’s conception, it was not supposed to be condemnation of Scientology.  The book was intended to act as an investigation and informative discussion of the merits and criticisms of the organization, but what the author found was uniformly disturbing and horrifying.  Enter documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, who sought to adapt the book into a documentary, and I’ll be damned if he did not succeed in making one of the most compelling documentaries in recent memory, and not just because of its sensational material.

Gibney excels as a documentarian because he is able to craft a story purely through his research and his interviews, which sounds like a no brainer as far as documentaries go but can be rather difficult to achieve in execution.  Here, Gibney begins his story with the life and mind of Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, whom evidence and testimony paints in two seemingly disparate lights: as a manipulative cult leader seeking to create a personal tax shelter or as a disturbed individual who actually believes what he tells his followers.  Gibney rather amazingly embraces that contradiction and shows that Hubbard could well have been both simultaneously, a man with selfish intentions who melted under the self-imposed pressures of the mythology he created.

However, this fascinating biographical study is only the tip of the iceberg, as the film starts to investigate Hubbard’s successor as leader of the church, David Miscavige.  Miscavige is infamous for his unwillingness to engage in interviews or discourse with the media, and Gibney tries to explain this seclusion by looking to how Miscavige was brought up in the church, how he manipulated his way into a position of absolute power within the church’s ranks, and how he has abused that power to corrupt the organization even beyond its founder’s intentions, causing even the IRS to bend to his will.  This film exposes Miscavige as the head of the largest corporation in the world and how he has gotten away with passing it off as a tax-exempt religion.  It is gripping stuff.

But what this all culminates in is not just a biography of the organization itself, but of the people it has used and abused to further its ends.  There is some obligatory service rendered to the lives and manipulations of noted Scientologist celebrities such as John Travolta and Tom Cruise, whose subjugation into being spokespeople for the church is sadder than I had ever realized.  But it is in the numerous interviews with survivors of the mental, emotional, and physical abuse administered by the church that really strike home the monstrosity of this organization and what it can get away with under the banner of religious freedom.  This includes former leaders within the church who have since become disillusioned, people who have been sent to actual prison camps for re-education, and those who have been harassed by the church in the many years since leaving.  It is eye-opening to just how horrible the infamous group is to those in its fold.

The last frame of the film is a list of those who declined to be interviewed, exclusively consisting of those still affiliated with the Church of Scientology.  The film posits that to appear in public would necessitate self-defense against the claims that hundreds of their former ranks have alleged, and that the church is not equipped to deny any of the mountains of evidence against them.  Alex Gibney has compiled such a complete case against the institution that the two hour runtime is collapsing under the weight of the evidence, as there are undoubtedly many stories that there simply wasn’t enough runtime to share.  This is a brilliant instance of documentary filmmaking and deserves your undivided attention.  Give it just that.