The head of this team for the "Spotlight" section of the paper is played by Michael Keaton. Is he good enough for another Oscar nomination, one to follow the nomination he got for Birdman? Yes.
Birdman won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2014. In it, Keaton played a middle-aged actor in a career lull. Twenty years earlier, he was a top Hollywood action movie star. Now he's turned to the serious Broadway stage for reinvention and career revival. There is opposition. There's prejudice against him because he was a Hollywood star. He's in the cast of a company in troubled rehearsals for a Broadway drama slated to open. The company has individual egos. The talented but neurotic actors never seem to come together as a team to put on the show. That's just the opposite in Spotlight. This company works together as a team. A hard-working, no frills team at a time when journalism itself is on the brink of major changes due to social media and the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. Here's a preview.
Spotlight also works as a tale of redemption. After America was attacked, we've read that there were signs of possible danger, signs that some officials in Washington didn't fully regard. Were there signs in Boston that priests had been sexually inappropriate? Were there adult males who, in youth, had been sexually molested by priests but their stories seemed to fall on deaf journalistic ears? Something had to be done.
I'm Catholic and come from a Catholic family. Most of my education was in parochial schools. The first time I ever heard about a priest being sexually inappropriate was when I was a young adult, new in my broadcast career and working in Milwaukee. I was at a neighborhood bar with friends and struck up a conversation with a friendly guy about Catholic school. We traded stories about being altar boys. Then we talked about altar boy retreats. I never went on one but he used to attend them. He stopped when a priest came into his room one night. "The next thing I know, he's on top of me," he said seriously. I was stunned and speechless for a moment because I'd never heard of such a thing. I said, "Did you tell your parents?" He replied that his parents would've killed him had he ever said something like that about the beloved priest. There was nothing he could do. And then I got it. It wasn't just sex. It was power. The abuse of power.
That reality is in Spotlight. That newspaper team is the David going up against the powerful corporate Goliath of the Catholic Archdiocese. This is an excellent movie with fine actors in top form. Besides Michael Keaton and Rachel McAdams, the cast includes Mark Ruffalo, Liev Schreiber, Stanley Tucci, John Slattery and Billy Crudup. It was written and directed by Tom McCarthy. He also directed and wrote The Station Agent, The Visitor and Win Win. Those three I'd highly recommend for weekend DVD rentals. I'll not be surprised if Tom McCarthy gets Oscar nominations for writing and directing Spotlight.
Put it on your cineplex movie list. Spotlight is one of the best films of this year.
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