2015 drama, dir. Tom McCarthy, Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo:
IMDb /
allmovie. The
Boston Globe's investigative team is going to get to the bottom of
this story no matter who tells them to lay off.
Well, obviously this is a journalistic fantasy. It's what people
dream of when they go into the job, and what keeps them going as they
copy out another corporate press release and wonder why nobody reads
newspapers any more, must be these kids and their internets. And like
2012's Argo, which similarly felt like the story that a profession
(in that case the CIA) would like to have told about itself, it's
something of a hagiography.
But it works better. For one thing, it doesn't significantly distort
the events it's recounting (as far as I can tell; at least, nobody
involved has come forward to say "no, it wasn't like that"), even when
that would make for a more dramatic story. (Young reporter is
desperate to get hold of the court documents, but is just too late and
they're closed for the day… but it turns out that a bunch of those
documents were already available anyway, just being ignored.) For
another thing, rather than the usual filmic process of making a hero
of This One Guy, or even This One Team even as we follow them through
the process, the praise is spread over the whole system of journalism
and of having investigative reporters at all. (And some of the blame –
the information had been laid on the team leader many years back, and
he'd ignored it.)
And while a conventional feelgood film would say that this one
corrupt guy was taken down and now the problem is over, it's made
explicitly clear that sexual abuse of children by clergy is very much
an ongoing problem. (I should declare an interest, I suppose: I was
brought up Catholic, and never met anything that would indicate that
this was happening, but most of the parish priests I encountered had
"housekeepers" who were also their acknowledged mistresses, so I
couldn't regard them as much of a moral authority.)
All of this does mean that the film doesn't quite hit the standard
dramatic beats – but for me that's a good thing, because there are
lots of films that do that (and don't pretend to be the truth).
Visually it's not particularly stunning either, but in a preamble set
in the 1970s it doesn't feel the need to spray Seventies Look
sideburns and big glasses over everyone, so that's a good thing.
As far as the acting is concerned, these people are generally good;
they inhabit the roles but they don't make them larger than life. Mark
Ruffalo is very visibly doing the "you know me as a handsome slab of
beef, but see, I can look like a normal person" thing, but he also has
some lovely non-verbal bits.
If there's a flaw here for me, it's that the film is much more about
the journalism than about the abuse. But it's a legitimate choice.
Once more if you want more of my witterings you should listen to
Ribbon of Memes.
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