Spotlight isn’t bad – but a film on the thalidomide scandal is the real must-see journalism drama
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Version 0 of 1. Two new films take investigative journalism as their subject. The first, Spotlight, is a Hollywood feature that tells how the Boston Globe revealed the sexual abuse committed by hundreds of Catholic priests that until then had been deviously covered up by the hierarchy. Directed by Tom McCarthy, its cast includes Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, John Slattery (Roger Sterling in Mad Men) and Rachel McAdams. It appears in many critics’ lists of last year’s top 10 films and has six Oscar nominations, including best picture, which it has been strongly tipped to win. It cost $20m (£14m) to make – a snip by Hollywood standards – and had already taken $31m at the box office by mid-January, two months after its US release. Anyone with only a casual interest in the cinema will have heard of it. That isn’t the case with the second film, which is far harder to find: during the next month it will appear like an unloved touring rep company for one night only in Oxford, Liverpool, York and Norwich, and equally briefly at one or two small cinemas in London. It’s a documentary directed by the sibling film-makers Jacqui and David Morris, and tells the story of the Sunday Times’ struggle to publish the history of thalidomide and to win proper compensation for the drug’s victims. It cost about $500,000 – a 40th of Spotlight’s budget – and rather than star actors, it features many real heroines and heroes, including its protagonist, the Sunday Times’s then editor Harold Evans. The worst thing about this film is its title, Attacking the Devil: Harold Evans and the Last Nazi War Crime, which manages to be both opaque and catchpenny. In other respects, it seems a far better film than Spotlight – richer, more complicated, more informative and more affecting. Most of this difference is present in the reality that inspired the films. Whatever psychological damage Boston’s paedophile clergy may have inflicted on their victims, its physical invisibility makes it far less startling than the effect of thalidomide on babies in the womb. And however oppressive the behaviour of Boston’s Catholic hierarchy may have been 15 years ago, as an opponent of free reporting, it fell some way short of the enemies Evans had to face in the 1960s and 70s, which was nothing less than Britain’s legal and political establishment standing side by side with the FTSE 100-listed whisky and pharmaceuticals company, Distillers. Then there’s the question of depiction. As a feature, Spotlight has the job of recreating the process of journalism, both persuasively and interestingly. Unlike the work of deep-sea divers, surgeons or SAS officers, it isn’t naturally pictorial. A film-maker on entering a newspaper office will ask the staff “just to behave as you usually would” before becoming quickly dissatisfied with the laconic talk on the phone, the prolonged staring at computer screens, the quiet clack-clack of the keyboard. Soon there will be requests to liven things up a little. “Couldn’t you two have a cup of coffee and talk about the story?” “Could you look at your watch and mention the deadline?” “Couldn’t you shout into the phone, maybe?” Spotlight strikes only a few false notes in this department. Rachel McAdams is given the spectacular ability to take down an interview in her notebook and walk at the same time; a priest fesses up instantly on his doorstep after a single question (in my experience, the doorstep confession is unknown); the dialogue is sometimes too expository to be credible. But the film’s big faults lie in the opposite direction. For a film “based on a true story” – a Hollywood slogan that usually precedes a cubist arrangement of the facts – Spotlight is remarkably faithful to the long littleness of life. The reporters in the Spotlight investigations team are a decent and harmonious bunch. The newly arrived editor is decent. The recently departed editor is decent. The owner is exceptionally decent. A different kind of film – one, say, with a permit to invent and embroider – might show the proprietor as a coward and one of the investigating reporters as a mole for Opus Dei, but then that kind of film wouldn’t have actors representing real, named people, who could be awkward and sue. What little tension there is in the film comes from the argument over when the paper should publish the story: now, when they have the details of the abuse, or later, when the hierarchy’s complicity can be proved. “We gotta nail these scumbags,” says the feistiest reporter (Ruffalo). “We gotta show people that nobody can get away with this, not a priest, or a cardinal, or a freaking pope.” It isn’t a bad film – and its discreet, non-voyeuristic treatment of the abuse is greatly in its favour – but it treats a simple story too simply. Victims come forward, the scumbags are nailed, good journalism triumphs. You think: if verisimilitude is the point, why not lay off all these actors and match archive footage to contemporary interviews (including the priestly culprits so absent in the present film) and make a documentary? That method works beautifully in the Harold Evans film, which is moving in unexpected ways. The surviving thalidomiders are now all in their 50s; it would be strange not to be moved by their bravery and physical skill, or by the sight of them in their childhood as medical curiosities – “freaks” who, as Evans discovered in his time at the Northern Echo, many people thought should never be seen in a newspaper. One mother describes, in mimes and whispers, how her husband left her and their child (“it’s either him or me”) as that child sits beside her – whether knowing or unknowing is hard to say. Later, in his years at the Sunday Times, Evans probably did more than anyone to soften public distaste towards deformity by publishing pictures of thalidomide children week after week, accompanying interviews by Marjorie Wallace. Evans believed in the dictum of an American editor that a newspaper campaign only began to be noticed by the public when it had reached the stage of boring its own staff, and I think that those of us on the Sunday Times who weren’t directly involved did indeed begin to be bored. But watching the film this week (and not bored for a minute), I felt how lucky I’d been to work with such a fine editor, however peripherally, on a well-funded newspaper where patient, painstaking and intelligent journalism, together with Evans’s steady nerve, had uncovered the truth about an inadequately tested drug and improved and dignified the lives of its victims. One message is common to both films: good journalism needs to be paid for. Where its basic instinct – curiosity – comes from is less easy to be sure of, but Evans begins with an illuminating story. In the summer of 1940, his father, a Manchester train driver, took the family on holiday to Rhyl in north Wales. On the beach they meet some soldiers who had been evacuated from Dunkirk. The 12-year-old Evans notices that their conversation about the events in France doesn’t match the bulldog-spirit stories in the newspapers: “Bloody Marvellous!” says the Daily Mirror. A burst of old black-and-white footage matches the story. A train on Rhyl’s miniature railway curves fuzzily around a bend. To imagine Evans as part of this scene as well as our present lives, and asking questions of both … well, this is moving, too. It isn’t up for an Oscar, but do see this film. |