Oscar-nominated actor/writer/director Tom McCarthy was on a roll as a film-maker after The Station Agent, The Visitor and Win Win all won rave reviews. He faltered horribly with the Adam Sandler-starring comedy The Cobbler, but his latest, Spotlight, which he also co-wrote, looks set to haul him back on track.
The exceptional cast McCarthy assembled should help him achieve that goal. Michael Keaton, in his first post-Birdman role (ignoring his voice work in Minions), stars alongside Rachel McAdams, John Slattery, Mark Ruffalo, Liev Schreiber and Stanley Tucci as the Boston Globe team who uncovered a massive child abuse cover-up within the local Catholic archdiocese, and later won a Pulitzer prize for their efforts. Billy Crudup, coming off a strong turn in The Stanford Prison Experiment, stars as a church representative trying to shut them down.
“We’ve got two stories here,” says Keaton as Walter “Robby” Robinson, the editor of the Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigations team. “A story about degenerate clergy and a story about a bunch of lawyers turning child abuse into a cottage industry. Which story do you want us to write? Because we’re writing one of them.” With its sweeping aerial shots of Boston and scenes of confrontations in lawyers’ offices and on doorsteps, the two-minute trailer sells Spotlight as a timely and important movie to set alongside the likes of All the President’s Men and Ron Howard’s newsroom thriller The Paper - which also starred Keaton as a newspaper editor.
With a 6 November release date in the US, it’s clear distributor Open Road Films is gunning for Oscar. Before opening this fall, Spotlight begins its awards campaign on the festival circuit, premiering at the Venice film festival, followed by a special presentation screening in Toronto.
