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Spotlight: Mini-review

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Mark Ruffalo

Oscar may be calling on Mark Ruffalo after Spotlight

ASince the advent of television, which forever changed the nature of journalism in this country, there has only been one great movie about traditional print journalism, All the President’s Men. Until 2015, that is. Spotlight may lack the star power of the Robert Redford/Dustin Hoffman Watergate tale, but it’s every bit as powerful a movie. 

Spotlight tells the story of the Boston Globe‘s investigation of the sex scandal involving dozens of local priests who had molested children, mostly boys, for decades. Like Watergate, however, the bigger story was the cover-up orchestrated by the Catholic Church hierarchy. The Globe‘s new managing editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) gets wind of the story and suggests that the newspaper’s “Spotlight” team of investigative reporters under the direction of editor Robby Robinson (Michael Keaton) look into it. Slowly and painstakingly, the team puts the story together. 

On one level, Spotlight is an excellent procedural on the news business. The team pursue leads, interview witnesses, and scour courthouses and school yearbooks for evidence. But the more they look into the case, the more they realize how it affects them personally. As the story develops, one reporter (Rachel McAdams) can no longer go with her mother to church. Another (Brian d’Arcy éJames) is stunned to learn that one of the pedophile priests lives around the corner from him. Robby feels somewhat guilty himself when an exasperated attorney (Stanley Tucci) reveals that the Globe knew about the story a decade earlier and buried it. Spotlight also raises the bigger moral issues as well, namely whether it’s better not to look at the Church’s involvement in the scandal too closely, in order to maintain its image for the greater public good. Somewhat surprisingly, considering the incendiary nature of the content, Spotlight avoids histrionics for the most part, except for one impassioned speech by the most emotional reporter, played by Mark Ruffalo. However, it’s director Tom McCarthy‘s deliberate manner in staging scenes ranging from embarrassed victim confessions to a bizarrely creepy defense by one priest of his molestation that give the movie its quiet power. The real stunner occurs during the end credits, which show the large number of cities around the world in which similar Church sex scandals took place, and the audience realizes full impact of the Globe‘s exposé. Although I haven’t seen a few of the other Oscar contenders, for my money, Spotlight is the best movie of the year
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Truth: Mini-review

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Cate Blanchett

Cate Blanchett can’t handle the truth

C+One of the younger Robert Redford‘s best roles was playing reporter Bob Woodward in perhaps the best journalism movie ever made, All the President’s Men. So, in a way it’s fitting that, in the twilight of his career, he plays another famous journalist, Dan Rather, in Truth. Unfortunately, just as Truth dramatizes a low moment in American journalism, it’s a considerably lesser film than All the President’s Men.

Dan Rather is actually a secondary character in Truth, which is the based on the memoir of former CBS producer Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett). During the 2004 presidential campaign, she learns that President George W. Bush’s National Guard records during the Vietnam War may have been falsified and that Guard officials may have covered up the fact that Bush wasn’t actually on flight duty in Alabama as he claimed. Despite not having the original source documents, she persuades CBS officials to run the story, narrated by Rather, on 60 Minutes. The story immediately blows up in her face as right-wing bloggers and other news outlets point out that the documents may have been created with Microsoft Word.  

Truth suffers from many of the same problems as Mapes’s original reporting of the National Guard story. Although it pays lip service to the errors made in rushing the story to air, the movie is essentially a two-hour defense of Mapes and, to a lesser extent, Rather. It’s understandable Mapes chose to defend herself in her memoir, but the screenplay by director James Vanderbilt is stacked with flag-waving, flowery defenses of the free press by the Greek chorus of Mapes’s staff members (Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace, and Elisabeth Moss).  Admittedly, Truth does not purport to be a documentary, but its heavy-handed one-sidedness diminishes the effectiveness of Blanchett’s impassioned performance. She is quite good here, as, in a different way, is Redford, who, instead of trying to mimic Rather, projects his own dignified persona onto the screen instead. Redford’s Dan Rather emerges as the saddest casualty of the debacle. Truth is also good at showing how CBS News (and all TV news) had by 2004 become a mere part of the network’s entertainment offerings. Ratings drove the initial corporate decision to air the story, and a desire to protect those ratings largely drove the witch hunt that followed. However, although Truth does make some valid points, ultimately, the truth gets lost in Mapes’s and Vanderbilt’s attempts to make a point.
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A Walk in the Woods: Mini-review

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Robert Redford

This movie is A Piece of Cake for Robert Redford

B-Supposedly, Robert Redford acquired the rights to Bill Bryson’s memoir, A Walk in the Woods, a decade ago as a planned re-teaming with Paul Newman that sadly never occurred. A decade later, Redford finally gets to take his walk, actually a hike down the Appalachian Trail, only now his companion is Nick Nolte. Redford, Nolte, and the Trail are as good as ever, but the movie’s script has definitely seen better days.

At the start of A Walk in the Woods,  Bryson (Redford) has lost his zest for writing and feels he is just going through the motions. On a whim, he decides to hike the Trail, mostly to prove to himself he still can. His understanding wife (Emma Thompson) insists he take a companion, and the only person who will go is Stephen Katz (Nolte), an estranged buddy from his bachelor days traveling around Europe decades earlier. What Bryson soon learns is that Katz’s life has gone steadily downhill since then.

Unlike last year’s Wild with Reese Witherspoon, A Walk in the Woods conveys little about the experience of long-distance hiking other than an occasional picturesque vista captured by director Ken Kwapis. Instead, the movie consists of Redford’s wry sarcasm and Nolte’s huffing and grumbling. Both are fun to watch (Walk comes close to the star-reading-the-phone-book level at times), and they have an easy-going chemistry together that could easily support another hour of film. The movie’s plot, however, doesn’t support even the existing 100 minutes or so. It consists mostly of comic interludes with angry bears and angrier husbands (when Katz flirts with a woman in a laundromat), followed by the inevitable bonding moment when the duo get into real trouble. Director Kwapis has mostly worked in television, and Walk has the feel of an overlong sitcom episode with two big name stars. Redford and Nolte, for their part, are content to stay within the script and use their enormous charisma and screen presence to improve some fairly routine gags. They may have aged, but their timing and acting skills are as good as ever. A Walk in the Woods is enjoyable solely for the opportunity to see two great actors having some fun onscreen in what nowadays are rare starring roles  It’s only when the movie ends, rather abruptly, that we realize that the film should have accomplished more during their time on the trail.
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