The Movies: Reviews of Four Oscar Nominees

Spotlight tells the story of the Boston Globe’s explosive expose of child abuse in the Boston diocese, which later detonated throughout the Catholic world. The trailer, seen in theater previews and on YouTube, depicts reporter Michael Rezendez (played by Mark Ruffalo) demanding to know when the newspaper will go public with what it has learned. It’s an authentic emotional flashpoint, but it’s also unrepresentative of what makes this movie so powerful; for this is a film that studiedly avoids emotional grandstanding.

The background of the story, the Church’s systematic protection of repeat sexual predators, is so emotionally charged that the film doesn’t need to grandstand. It is fundamentally a movie about journalism—work-a-day, multi-sourced, investigative journalism of the kind that is threatened by the demand for digital speed and brevity. The victims, now in their adulthood, are heartbreaking, but quietly so. The one accused priest who makes a brief appearance is depicted not as a monster, but as pathetic and emotionally stunted. The journalists are not firebrands, just very competent professionals (and there are none of the shopworn motifs about reporters; they even dress reasonably well, or at least not like total slobs). All of the actors are exceptional—Ruffalo as Rezendez (a likeable regular guy and old school reporter), Michael Keaton as Spotlight team leader Robby Robinson (careful, smart, treading the waters with Church higher-ups who would like the story to go away), and Liev Schreiber as editor Marty Baron (a deeply self-contained character whose recessive nature draws you to him and drives the reporters). This is a brilliant movie.

***********

Brooklyn, based on the novel by Colm Toibin, is proof in this wised-up age that a compelling movie can still be made from a simple love story, some fine acting, and some pretty camera work. Set in 1952, a young Irish girl named Eilis (pronounced AY-lish), leaves her mother and sister behind when she emigrates to America, landing in Brooklyn where she falls in love with a local. Complications arise when she is called back to the old country upon the death of her sister, and Eilis must make a choice between her birth home and her life in the New World.

The primary romantic love story and triangle is a sentimental one, perhaps a bit too impossibly sweet for wised-up types. And the movie trades unashamedly on a couple of charms that for American audiences will never, ever die: period images of the immigrant experience, and the special magic that adheres to anything involving an accent or a brogue from the British Isles.

So much for wised-up cynicism. The really compelling love story here is the love of a place called home and the heartache and contradictions that always attend having to leave. Saoirse Ronan is a contender for best actress in a leading role. Certainly, if there were a category for “Most Expressive Face” she would walk away with it.

*********
The Big Short (based on the non-fiction book by Michael Lewis) depicts the true story of some sharp Wall Street types who foresaw the colossal fraudulence of the mortgage industry and its sensational collapse in 2008. It’s an entertaining education if not exactly a comfortable movie-going experience. The humor—it does actually manage to be funny—is very bitter, and the joke, I’m afraid, is on the American public (that’s all of us), whose distracted cultural self-absorption and consumerism is depicted as fodder for a vast corruption founded, from top to bottom, on make-believe. There is a wicked cleverness in the movie’s use of popular celebrities to explain the esoteric “instruments” designed by hedge fund managers at the top. (Selena Gomez, at a roulette wheel in Vegas, explains “collateralized debt obligations.”) At the bottom end, a pair of Florida real estate guttersnipes make a special practice of selling over-leveraged mansions with adjustable rate mortgages to poll-dancing strippers who have a lot of ready cash and a tendency to be acquisitive.

It all really happened. The protagonists are not villains, just guys who saw what was coming and—with varying degrees of cynicism or anguish—cashed in. Steve Carell plays the anguished one, who prophetically announces as the house of cards is collapsing that no one will be held accountable and the resulting catastrophe will be blamed on immigrants and poor people.

**********

“Out in the world, things happen and happen and happen, and it never stops.” That’s just one of the Zen-like observations of a five-year old boy named Jack who emerges from a room in which he has spent all his young life with his mother, in Room, the most decidedly un-Hollywood movie of the seven nominees for Best Picture. And ponder this (the quote isn’t exact): “Out in the world there is so much space that time gets spread very thin like butter all over the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.”

For the first approximately 20 minutes, viewers have no explicitly clear idea why Jack and his mother are in the room, but are immersed in the world they have fashioned of out of the small space. Just as well, because the backstory to why they are there is not what the film is about. (Cleveland audiences may be unavoidably reminded of a certain sensational local episode; my advice is to forget about it.) What the film is about is Jack’s awakening to an unconfined universe he didn’t know existed, a meditation on the vastness of human freedom in a world without walls, without boundaries—a freedom that it is all but impossible not to waste. His esoteric but believably childlike observations are grounded in the unglamorous reality of his surroundings, and the complications associated with the aftermath of his and his mother’s ordeal. (Some of that aftermath seems wayward and disjointed or just nonsensical—a distraction from the movie’s purpose.) The film didn’t quite come together (for this viewer) until the last powerful scene when Jack and his mother return to look at the room, now gutted and empty. Anyone who has ever revisited a landmark of one’s most trying period, from which it was thought there was no release, will recognize the emotions—not least of which is a sympathy for the person you once were. And a very peculiar longing for the comfortable familiarity of our sundry confinements—predicaments, routines, obsessions and addictions. There is just the merest, but unmistakable, wistfulness in Jack’s voice when he tells his mother, “A room isn’t a room when there isn’t a door,” before the two of them leave it behind them forever.