88. Spotlight (2015)

Plot Intro

Boston, 2001. A team of investigative journalists at the Boston Globe (Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Michael Keaton, Liev Schreiber, John Slattery, Brian d’Arcy James) come across some documents suggesting that a Catholic priest may be guilty of sexually abusing minors. As they look deeper, they discover far more than they bargained for…

Doug says...

I watched Spotlight a couple of years ago but wasn’t impressed. I think I was half-watching it and doing other things and got the gist of it - paedophile priests, big cover-up by Catholic Church - and found it an unfinished, slightly dull film. 

This time I watched it and was struck dumb. This is an extraordinary, subtle, and powerfully unsentimental examination of how journalism at its best has to power to rock and unseat huge corporations shrouded in mystery of their own making. There is no bigger Goliath than the Catholic Church which has somehow managed to survive relentless scandals globally. But where the film Philomena left me storming with rage, this one is somehow quieter and more gripping. 

There is no luck. It is all hard graft and work. We see the team of reporters (a uniformly brilliant ensemble performance) poring over books, analysing data, developing leads and basically working bloody hard to get results. In one scene, a reporter desperately tries to get files with explosive knowledge from the courthouse - files that are technically open access yet the Church has managed to make ‘disappear’. It’s a brilliantly tense series of scenes that leaves you gobsmacked at the sheer awfulness of the Church and gunning for this lone reporter battling the red tape to tell the story. 

We also hear from the victims. I think overall I’m most impressed by how the film deals with this. We hear the stories from the victims, and see how they have been affected by the abuse, and yet it is not sensationalised or sentimentalised. In fact, the emotion comes in a later scene when one reporter is desperate to publish what they have and the editor forces them to hold off, and wait till they can report the bigger scene. It’s a furious argument in which you fully understand both sides - and in a way acts as a sort of catharsis for the emotions from the victims’ testimonials. These reporters care most about the story and the victims - there is no petty squabble at play here. 

Where the victims are given honest space, so too are the shadows of the Church itself. In one scene, a high up official politely and terrifyingly makes ominous threats against one of the reporters, in another a priest (clearly in the grip of dementia) openly admits to one of the reporters that he abused the children. In yet another the principal of a school asks the reporters to keep hush about a priest who abused children on the hockey team which he coached. These aren’t shown as monsters - they’re shown as people who think and act a certain way, who have managed to somehow shuffle the awfulness of what they’re covering up out of their mind. The priest with dementia says himself ‘well, I was raped’. There is acknowledgement made that most (if not all) of these abusers would have suffered some psychosexual abuse themselves. 

After the film finished I found myself in tears and struggling to speak for quite some time. Paul assumed that it was the horror of the abusers and the church’s disgusting actions - and he wasn’t completely wrong. But I was actually most moved by the final scene in which the Spotlight team find themselves inundated with callers - ‘survivors’ - reporting their own abuse. In a world where the Church loomed large, how astonishing and freeing it must have been for these survivors to at last be able to bring light to their own history of abuse, and let their history with all its twisted and gnarly after-effects finally be shown - and recognised. 

The Catholic Church openly welcomed this film, showing screenings, and thanking the producers for essentially ‘helping them be better’. As much salt as one might take this with, it’s still an example of Goliath - if not dead - being made to acknowledge David is right, and perhaps strive to be better.  

Highlight 

The moments throughout the film that show the tenacity, skill and professionalism of the journalists are gripping and should be held as a beacon to all those in that industry. 

Lowlight

None. Everything was dealt with sensitively, intelligently and allowing discussion - whether of abuser or abused, Church or Media. 

Mark 

10/10

Paul says...

Spotlight was, like Argo and Birdman, another surprise win. It defeated films with a much higher profile, such as The Big Short, Brooklyn, Mad Max: Fury Road, Bridge of Spies, The Martian, The Revenant and Room. It was the first Best Picture winner since 1952 to only win one other Oscar (for screenplay) and lost out on its other five nominations. As mentioned in my Birdman review, it is interesting that, in the age of Netflix, multi-award winning epics are not the big winners anymore because most of these stories can now be binged in 10-episode mini series. So we have another understated, rather unassuming film, winning the most coveted award in cinema.

As Doug says, it’s an absolute hard-hitter due to its stomach-churning and heart-breaking content, which is remarkable bearing in mind that you never see any of these crimes being committed. There is one, brief flashback that opens the film but so little is seen in it, it’s almost redundant. The emphasis here is on our heroic journalists’ techniques and integrity. The sense of realism is very strong. Every line of dialogue feels like something a real person would say. The revelations that come out of their investigation are not discovered through big, melodramatic reveals or tearful courtroom confessions. Instead, horrible crimes are brought to light by trawling through archival tomes, finding long-hidden files (or, in some cases, not finding them), and by asking the gutsy, confrontational questions at the right time. I was certainly left with great admiration for the work of investigative journalists (as well as a hatred for the Catholic Church, oddly enough).

One of the best plot choices that these film makers chose to do was not to show much of the Catholic church at all. It’s spoken of as some kind of omni-present, unseen entity. It’s not just a collection of buildings and meetings, it’s intricately woven into our society and our morals. It’s also pertinent that, in most outdoor scenes, there is a church somewhere in the background, either slightly hidden, or looming over our characters like a vulture. A haunting directorial choice. 

The exact acts of the culpable priests are only spoken of, but the actors of the victims convey their fragility and their desperation for retribution. We also get a firm understanding of how and why these priests got away with it. Their victims were from broken, desperate households, households so in awe of the church that they would turn a blind eye, or, in one case, a young boy struggling with his homosexuality. This last character is played with tremendous power by an actor called Michael Cyril Creighton who deserves a big shout-out for such a small role.

A bit of a pre-warning: this is a very wordy film. Like I said, journalism is portrayed through small acts of investigation, and the crimes are not portrayed, only spoken about. Names of priests, lawyers, politicians, and journalists are bandied about in the fast-paced script and I occasionally found it hard to keep track. Don’t go in expecting chase scenes, melodrama or explosions. This is verging on documentary and may not be for everyone.

Surprisingly, the 2010s have been a tremendous decade for Best Picture Oscars, with The King’s Speech, The Artist, Argo and Birdman all in quick succession. And Spotlight is another gem to add to the list. It brilliantly conveys journalistic excitement. We share the horror these people feel when they make their discoveries. We share their frustration with bureaucratic barriers, or when 9/11 happens and suddenly the whole investigation has to be put on hold for a more imperative story. And we understand their development from trying to find a story that sells a paper, through to exposing a story that brings justice to literally thousands in Boston alone. This is writing at its best, and its angriest. 

Highlight

Michael Cyril Creighton’s scene in which he provides the story of his childhood abuse to Rachel McAdams is a hard watch. Creighton brilliantly captures this man’s emotional vulnerability and his desire to be strong. It’s all the more heart-breaking when he comes to the end of his story and then looks off-camera and says “Oh look, there’s a church”, showing how he is constantly haunted by his trauma. 

Lowlight

There were times when I wasn’t really sure what was happening, exactly. This is a very minor quibble because usually things came together. But the fast-paced complexity of the film could sometimes lead to me feeling a bit disengaged. 

Mark

9/10

87. Birdman (2014)

Plot Intro

Ageing actor Riggan (Michael Keaton) is best known for his portrayal of superhero, Birdman, many years ago but is now trying to break into the theatre world with his own adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story. Throughout the rehearsals and final performance, he must contend with a self-absorbed method actor (Edward Norton), an equally insecure leading actress (Naomi Watts), his recovering drug-addict daughter (Emma Stone), an avaricious producer (Zach Galifianakis) and an intensely snobbish theatre critic (Lindsay Duncan). Good luck to him.

Doug says...

Birdman is the thrilling tale of a half-man half-bird who soars through America, righting wrongs and doing duels with his nose/beak hybrid. 

Not really, although that would be excellent. Actually Birdman is an artistic and dreamlike critique of the acting business, of fame and of the desire of artists to create something meaningful rather than something flashy and crowd-pleasing. 

It’s a tour-de-force. Shot in one (seemingly) continuous take, the camera moves, dodges, follows people, takes unexpected detours and pulls together a narrative of a man - Riggan - who used to be famous for playing a superhero: Birdman. Now, aged, he is known for it but is trying to pull together a production (written, directed and starring himself) of a literary short story. It’s a thrilling ride visually as we cannot see the seams, so it feels almost as if the director said ‘go’ and shot the whole thing - except he couldn’t have because whole scenes and cast members appear where they could not have been before. 

It’s an incredible idea, and creates this dreamlike stupor of foggy confusion - how long does this take place over? Does it even matter? At points Riggan’s daughter Sam (the ever-glorious Emma Stone), an ex-druggie, challenges him in fights. Where the camera would normally cut to Riggan, now it stays on Sam, so we see her reactions to him, her anger at his silence. Through this unconventional style, we get to find out different things about our characters. But the characters themselves are enigmatic - eluding us - right down to Lindsay Duncan’s perfectly drawn theatre critic Tabitha whose hate-filled monologue about film actors taking over Broadway seems entirely plausible yet utterly baffling. Who are these people? Are they real? 

Not to mention of course Riggan’s rival Mike (Edward Norton) who thrills audiences with his realism, yet at one point has a disturbing #metoo moment when he tries to have sex with his co-star on stage for real - for the realism of it. The film takes aim at this style of acting (we’ve heard so many tales of actors like Dustin Hoffman putting their co-stars (particularly female) in uncomfortable positions to elicit ‘real’ reactions) and neither Riggan or Mike come off well - rather as dreamers refusing to accept any measure of truth. 

And then there’s the moment we see Birdman for real - floating behind Riggan, above him, his voice booming out arguments for returning to the character and leaving his ‘artistic pretensions’ behind. It’s a valid argument - and with the Marvel world as strong as it is now, many actors may face a collision in themselves between art-house and crowd-pleasers. 

Apparently the film required vast amounts of choreography to achieve the seamless way that people seem to go about the ordinary business - including one show-stopping moment when Riggan (locked out by accident mid-play) has to go through Times Square in his pants and is besieged by tourists who recognise him. Later his daughter Sam will tell him that this fame (caught on youtube) isn’t ever a bad thing. It’s choreography and meaning intertwined - we see the claustrophobia and also his status as he struts quickly through the crowds desperate to return to the stage. 

In a way, I think it’s better that none of the actors won Oscars (even though everyone delivered), because what is left of this film - is the film itself. This dreamlike, twisting narrative - right up to the last metaphorical moment - is brilliant cinema. We are left unsure of what - or who - is real, and whether any of it even happened at all. 

Highlight 

The camerawork. It’s rare that camerawork can be said to have ‘made’ a film - but here it’s phenomenal. 

Lowlight

Bah! Nothing!

Mark 

10/10

Paul says...

It’s 2014, not that long ago, and the standards of cinema are changing. This is because, that very same year, an online streaming service called Netflix hit 50 million subscribers. Now, for less than a tenner a month, viewers have access to a myriad of movies and tv shows and they can watch as many, many, many hours of them as they bloody well like. Going to the cinema is becoming less and less imperative, so movies have to keep up, not by making themselves bigger, longer and louder (we have enough Marvel movies for that) but by becoming more inventive and surprising in their story-telling.

Birdman is a prime example of such a movement. It defeated The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Imitation Game, Selma, The Theory of Everything and Whiplash to win Best Picture, and nabbed three other awards too. This isn’t a huge win as Best Pictures go, but it tied with Budapest Hotel for most nominations (9) and most wins (4), so it’s a pretty massive achievement for 2014. It really got people talking, starting off as a Michael-Keaton (“Oh him, that guy who played Beetlejuice”) come back special, and evolving into a critical, commercial and artistic success. 

As Doug says, the directing and camera work are what the film is all about, so it’s no surprise that Keaton, Norton and Stone all lost out on their acting award nominations, although they thoroughly deserved these nods. The action almost entirely takes place in or around the theatre where Riggan is desperately trying to make this paint-by-numbers drama work. The camera moves down a corridor and suddenly we’ve gone from day into night, it’ll pass through a door and we’ve gone from an empty theatre to a bustling premiere night and back again. Everything is happening not just in one place, but in one time, and the sense for me is that the theatre is a setting where time and space is conflated and Riggan’s entire existence now revolves inside this turbulent and exasperating building. 

This is further evidenced by the fact that the few times we leave the building altogether are either unpleasant or delusional experiences. Riggan has to scuttle naked from the back to the front entrance, having been locked out by accident; he dreams of flying around, returning to his Birdman alter ego who, incidentally, speaks to him throughout; and the film ends with him hospitalised in a rather embarrassing way. The theatre is not just Riggan’s life, it’s his lifeline, his only way of moving away from the “low art” cartoon that he once was into more esoteric circles, and leaving it sends him into his most vulnerable state.

The sadness of Birdman is that Riggan just cannot do it. Despite his best efforts, there is a tremendously infuriating scene in which Lindsay Duncan, who is spectacularly evil as a nefarious theatre critic, states that she is going to destroy his play simply because actors as mediocre as him steal the theatre space and success from better, more experienced and more worthy playwrights. I was further incensed by the fact that I kind of agreed with her. Duncan deserved a Best Supporting Actress nod for that.

Birdman is a film that has evidently grown out of rewrites, ideas and fast-thinking. Apparently, there were endless changes to the script and story (at one point, they considered a cameo from Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow), so it is quite remarkable that the makers have conjured something so complex yet so cogent. My one criticism is that the final 20 minutes or so sees the film go even more haywire than I thought possible. There are a huge number of possible endings and interpretations and admittedly the makers stated that they wanted it to be open to discussion. But they didn’t have to throw in every possible idea that they came up with!

Nonetheless, this is a gripping piece of work, full of outstanding acting from its ensemble, some cracking jokes, moments of pathos, and an incredible dissection of what it’s like to have a career in performing arts. Not that much fun by the looks of it.

Highlight

Lindsay Duncan’s big scene is an absolute stealer.  

Lowlight

The final 20 minutes could have had some cutting down in my opinion. The film loses its cogency- but only slightly, mind you.

Mark

9/10

Foreign Film 13: In the Mood for Love (Hong Kong, 2000)

Plot Intro

Hong Kong, the early 1960s. In a busy block of flats, a woman, Su (Maggie Cheung), and a man, Chow (Tony Leung) move next door to each other. Both of them have spouses that are perennially absent due to work commitments, so Su and Chow strike up a friendship. As they grow closer, they begin to suspect their spouses of having affairs, and that only drives them closer still…

Paul says...

In the Mood For Love is, according to Wikipedia, often named as one of the best films every made, and it’s certainly one of the most successful. It garnered huge amounts of award nominations (including a nomination for the Palm D’Or at Cannes, though conspicuously absent from the Academy Award nominations), Tony Leung, one of the most popular Hong Kong actors ever, won Best Actor for this film at Cannes, Maggie Cheung’s qipao outfits became hugely recognisable, and the reviews were, and remain, astronomically positive. It’s pretty disgraceful that I’d never really heard of it before but it was an easy choice for our World Cinema features.

And yes, this is a pretty lovely film, made all the more fascinating by director Wong Kar-Wai’s stylist choices. Despite his still and steady camera, his characters are almost always shrouded in shadow, off camera, half-seen or have their backs to the audience, and the scenes are quick and snappy and often with a sense of incompleteness, showing many characters and extras squeezed into the small, cramped quarters of 1960s Hong Kong apartments. This creates a strong sense of claustrophobia and lack of privacy which, at times, is pretty suffocating. Indeed, our two main characters appear to be the only people in Hong Kong who just want to be left alone (Su is frequently seen to be turning down invitations to dine with others and even when she accepts, she stands pensively to the side). It is no wonder that these two lonely yet permanently pestered individuals take solace in the peace of each others’ company.

I also thoroughly enjoyed the performances the two gave, and its easy to see why they are such popular performers. Cheung faces her friendly but slightly overbearing neighbours with a brave but forced face, and her body language is that of a fashionable woman with no life to boast of, and her mundane marches to a local stall to buy her noodles for dinner are quite sad to watch. Like Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter (a film which has an extremely similar storyline), our would-be lovers here never go to bed with each other, or even kiss. But they display a yearning for each other that transcends physical displays of love, comparable to Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer in the first hour of Call Me By Your Name (before they start bonking each other). I should also point out here that, as far as I could see, it is never really confirmed whether the main characters’ spouses are actually having affairs - our hero and heroine simply deduce this based on some pretty circumstantial evidence. I get a sense that we could see these people as deluded and falling apart due to their apparent displacement from the world around them.

I wouldn’t describe the film as perfect, however. Wong’s stylistic choices sometimes go too far, particularly in the final half hour. There’s a scene in which Chow waits for Su in a hotel room to see if she will join him and subsequently run away to Singapore. The frenetic camera work during this segment left it unclear to me whether she had gone to the hotel room or not, or why/why not. A quick read of the Wikipedia synopsis made things clear but I felt that the action became obscured by Wong’s desire to be clever. The final few minutes of the film also jump forward in time quickly and, again, it wasn’t entirely clear what was happening, which was frustrating after a rather captivating first hour in which the lovers gradually and oh so desperately get closer and closer.

In the Mood for Love is, objectively, a beautiful film that manages to capture the essence and feeling of love without resorting to melodrama or sexualisation, which is pretty difficult to do. It has a stylist tone that creates a very different world almost immediately, but this can be overbearing at times. Nonetheless, it deserved its various accolades and, after about 24 hours of reflection, I did like it.

Highlight

There’s a scene in which Su is confronting a man with his back to the camera (we think it is her husband) on his alleged affair. He at first denies it, then admits, and her reaction is understated. The camera quickly cuts to reveal that the man is, in fact, Chow and the two of them are simply rehearsing Su’s confrontation. It gets the one laugh of the whole film.

Lowlight

The last half hour is confused, and I felt Wong let his style choices get the better of him. 

Mark

7/10

Doug says...

This is a slow unfurling of a film, executed with such poise and elegance that it is at times heartachingly beautiful. What happens? We don’t actually know. 

It’s one of those ‘in-between’ films, capturing the sort-of relationship between two people. There’s heaps of them, films with encounters that don’t quite go anywhere, or tensions keeping people apart. I thought of Before Sunrise, Lost in Translation, Brief Encounter, The Remains of the Day - all films which show people not quite doing, not quite achieving - in essence then, utterly human. 

It’s a difficult genre - get it wrong and you run the risk of completely boring your audience. These discussions that go nowhere, have to have something underneath compelling it. In the examples above, that thing is sex. Or rather the want to have sex and love. It’s the same here, and I suppose this genre lends itself perfectly to this - the people desperate for intimacy with each other but (usually) never quite getting there. 

It’s achieved superbly well here. Much of the action seems to happen offstage, rather than see Su’s often-absent husband, we only ever see her reaction to him. We feel the smallness of these apartments, the paper thin walls where you can hear the chatter of the neighbours as if its in the room. Both Su and Chow are set up as firstly kindly nice people, and secondly terribly lonely. Their spouses are out and about most of the time and they begin to reach for each other’s company for solace. 

It’s worth noting that despite being a tension-filled, deeply romantic film, the lack of even a kiss shows how well you can tell a story without physical touch. If this was Hollywood, I’d imagine there’d be at least one interrupted sex-scene. But here they let the story unfold without any additional steaminess. 

As Paul says, it sadly loses focus in the last half hour, just when it should be tightening its grip and it has a wild chase to meet each other (which doesn’t succeed) and then becomes quite confusing. However it doesn’t spoil the first two thirds, which are filled with the unspoken desire communicated by the vibrant colours, the heavy romantic musical motif and the fact that Su and Chow barely look at each other, and somehow through that show how much they want each other. 

Repetition seems to be the key. We see Su always on her way to the rice stall (and not eating with her friendly but slightly annoying neighbours), we see Chow at work, the musical motif constantly replays, the journeys they tread are the same - so when we see a moment like Su trapped in Chow’s bedroom, unable to leave because the neighbours are just outside, it’s a jolt - a startling break to the routine, that you hope they will prolong and turn into something. It doesn’t - of course. 

And then there’s the question - are the spouses really having an affair? Personally I think yes, but then that’s because in the mire of uncertainty that this film creates, one longs for one fact to grasp with conviction. But who knows, perhaps there’s another film where Chow’s wife and Su’s husband are also standing close together, hands almost touching, just wishing that they could make the move - and never managing it. 

Highlight

I think the camera angles take the prize - it’s such a startling way of telling a story and feels fresh and instantly loaded with meaning. We never see certain people, we sometimes only see part of our lead characters, and the sense of being-and-not-being at the same time is captivating. 

Lowlight

The last half hour needed to knuckle down and focus rather than open up to become abstractly romantic. 

Mark
8/10