Avis des critiques

The subject calls for Sam Fuller's tabloid profundity, or, keeping with the drone-tone approach, David Fincher's scalpel-like acuity. Cowriter-director Tom McCarthy is content to do a Xerox gloss on the newsroom scenes from The Wire, in which he himself featured as a corrupt reporter. It's all very easygoing, competent, and pleasurable. But—given this subject matter, especially—should it be?

That there's no particularly "deep" meaning here is besides the point. Striking a difficult tonal balance between satire and Greek tragedy, Côté manages to communicate the kind of deep torment that comes from looking inward at a shallow life.

Directed by Tom McCarthy (The Station Agent, The Cobbler) and written by McCarthy and Josh Singer (writer and showrunner for the loopy television series Fringe and Lie to Me), the fact-checked film is a cleanly edited dispatch from the journalistic frontlines with no flowery phrases or bloated verbiage... A true crime story with no forensic lab work or yellow-taped crime scenes, no narrative tension or moral ambiguity, the film exudes slow-burn dread but no spine-tingling suspense.

It captures an essential truth about Boston, that feeling of drabness mixed with hostility and peculiarity anyone that who has ever had to knock on a stranger's door in that town has felt. The key scene in this regard is the one in which Rachel McAdams stands at the front door of a disgraced priest, who happily admits to his crimes while his sister barks and snipes, shooing McAdams off. I'm sure that woman puts an orange traffic cone in her parking space in May.

While there are universal truths here, it also masterfully filters in the specific context – this big city's small town mindset, the way it conspiratorially closes ranks around the church. As Garabedian sadly notes: "If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.

... In the blandly workmanlike, visually miserable (because—didja hear?—it's all about process) Spotlight, which for some reason wasn't an HBO movie, director Tom McCarthy falls back on the same shorthand [as in Tony Scott's The Taking of Pelham 123], stuffing his actors' faces with quick slices and cheap Chinese whenever possible. The point is, these Boston Globe investigative soldiers are so focused on leads, sources, and systemic hurdles that diet is an afterthought.

This is an ensemble piece, and each cast member complements the humming energy sparked by one another. Michael Keaton is an actor who can stand out without actually standing out -- it is preposterous thinking that he was once Batman, and even Birdman. But once again, it's Mark Ruffalo who's probably most memorable by turning what seems like a bland role into something with genuine vitality, and maybe with a soul.

The script, written by the film's director Tom McCarthy and the academic- and-showbiz marvel Josh Singer, is amazing in its mastery of the complex material, since many strands converged for the paper to break the hold of the hierarchy over the city—not only records of priest moves, testimony of victims and predators, but correspondence of the Cardinal and other bishops that were obtained by court action but put under a seal that the Catholic judge refuses to lift.

Happily, McCarthy's film rises to the occasion with understated force and intelligence: his is an expert, finely tuned procedural that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as its esteemed ancestor [All the President's Men].

The adherence to the facts is admirable and refreshing, and the film does develop a gripping momentum through Tom McArdle's nimble editing and the rigorous commitment to journalistic process. There is something quietly enthralling about watching a story like this come together, seeing the painstaking and distinctly unglamorous work of trawling through dusty archives and combing directories for clues gradually building into a scoop that reaches far beyond the scope of the reporters' expectations.

Even if Tom McCarthy had wanted to do something along the lines of the seven-minute split-diopter shot of Redford making the Dahlberg call, he couldn't have, because there's nothing for it in the script. Again: a compelling story, well-acted. And competently told. But if it hadn't been so well-acted the competence would seem like mediocrity.

McCarthy's previous films have been small, character-driven dramas that invariably win praise but also, from a certain type of cineaste, are dismissed as quaint and unexciting... And it just might be that the initial praise for Spotlight will give way to faint praise that it's "conventional"... Avoiding the obvious — that nowadays there's nothing conventional about a superbly crafted mainstream movie for adults — Spotlight does what it does so deftly that all it does is not at first apparent.