Spotlight remembers why real reporting matters

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A few years ago, a small reissue label put out the first commercial recording of David Shire’s score for All the President’s Men. The album is brief, its music minimal, quiet, repetitive — motifs more than themes, instrumental color more than melody, the sound of thread being steadily unraveled. The tones are low, like Hal Holbrook’s Deep Throat impatiently giving up a secret to Robert Redford’s Bob Woodward. The trombone section sounds draped in one damp trench coat. The strings sweat like Richard Nixon at an Ivy League barbecue. At no point does even one note suggest sunshine or resolution. (Recall that, in the movie, the teletype is the exit music — ours and, sometime later, offscreen, the president’s.)

Howard Shore composed the music for Spotlight, the best true-life newsroom procedural since All the President’s Men, which opens here Friday. Give or take Shore’s distractingly insistent score — a musically anonymous instruction manual for certain feelings of institutional shock and dismay — the studiously plain but utterly gripping Spotlight is also one of 2015’s best movies.

It seems frivolous to dwell on something as conspicuously artificial as movie music when we’re talking about a film that dramatizes a moment of historic import. And yet, some historic moments count twice when we view them through the prism of drama rather than through the lens of documentary. Then they count a third or a fourth time, depending on how much we discuss, tout, rewatch and (come late winter, maybe) reward such dramatization. As with the news — its gathering and reporting, not its business — everything depends on accuracy.

Shore has worked for David Cronenberg and Jonathan Demme — creepiness is on his palette, even if he wields no dissonance here, no noir. And stories come no creepier and no darker than the Boston Archdiocese’s generations-long cover-up of child sexual abuse by priests. What we hear instead while watching Spotlight — too much musically but just the right amounts of talk and nagging silences — is the slow discovery of the crimes, the conspiracy and the cover-up, and the heroic and stringently accurate reporting of same. (Heroic, yes: There’s no better adjective for stringently accurate reporting that prompts a community to recognize — and to halt — wrongdoing.)

Spotlight‘s matter-of-fact title is simply a recitation of a department name, an investigative desk at The Boston Globe. Its four journalists work for months on one thing at a time, one story eventually published as a series of long, deeply reported articles. There were big stories before the Boston Archdiocese news broke, in 2002, and there were big stories after. But the moral and religious breakdown at the center here packs a universal and scarring terror — one that could, even in the most well-meaning dramatization, lead to overacting that patronizes the audience.

But under director Tom McCarthy, there’s a kind of music in Spotlight‘s storytelling. The dialogue is staccato and sharply percussive, some of it necessarily expository but none of it dumbed-down or perfunctory. You may find yourself waiting for volume, for raised voices, for confrontation and fire- or waterworks. But the drama (if not Shore’s music) is quieter and subtler than that, made up of data crunching, pattern analysis, shoe-leather detective work and tireless interviewing. Pianissimo descents into archives and spreadsheets, atonal confessions.

Michael Keaton, as the team’s leader, editor Walter “Robby” Robinson, has long been a master of stop-start rhythms like those in newsrooms, and he’s career-best here. As his boss, Ben Bradlee Jr. (whose dad was Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate editor), John Slattery wears the pleated Dockers honorably and lends welcome traces of Roger Sterling wah-wah to the ensemble. As Bradlee’s new boss, Liev Schreiber offers legato counterpoint. (An uncredited Richard Jenkins, a disembodied voice on a couple of key phone calls — and a veteran of McCarthy’s The Visitor — is as good as anyone else you can see.)

If the acting isn’t perfect, the one dereliction is its own kind of fascination. Mark Ruffalo, playing reporter Michael Rezendes (who wrote the first of the eventual stories), rushes the tempo, never falling in as he should with Rachel McAdams and Brian d’Arcy James (rounding out the team). At first, you want to e-mail him at his onscreen desk and remind him that this isn’t a star vehicle. But just as Ruffalo approaches maximum ham, McCarthy and Josh Singer’s script sends him to meet crusading lawyer Mitchell Garabedian, whom Stanley Tucci plays like … well, I’m out of musical metaphors. Tucci just plays the shit out of this one, and he’s good enough to get Ruffalo back in line, as though you’re watching these events unfold in real time.

At its considerable best, Spotlight maintains that temporal illusion until, at the end, you see a long list of cities that have endured similar crises. A list that, of course, includes ours.