Movies now revel in cynicism — so much so that the new immigrant romance Brooklyn is inadvertently suspenseful: The viewer waits for something to scuttle the film’s grace-filled buoyancy. Scenes in which two family members, separated by an ocean, exchange dire news — with a consoling priest by the side of each — still manage to sustain a benevolent vision. Brooklyn shames the entirety of Spotlight, an inept, cynical pretense at muckraking the Catholic Church that valorizes journalists, not priests, as moral crusaders.
Brooklyn offers cultural and spiritual continuity. Its story of Eilis (pronounced “Ay-lish” and played by Saoirse Ronan, pronounced “Seer-sha”), who leaves her village in Ireland, drawn toward a future in the United States, concerns a young woman’s risk and faith. Yet director John Crowley, working from Nick Hornby’s adaptation of a Colm Toibin novel, has not made a sappy movie. The working-class borough to which Eilis immigrates is not a hipster wasteland but a place of uprooted people accustomed to hardship yet seeking new hopes. The movie is unillusioned. Its charm comes from the spiritual determination of each character. This was missing from James Gray’s The Immigrant, which dully, shamelessly imitated the tragic view of America in the Godfather films. Brooklyn evokes a different past. Set in 1952 (the year of John Ford’s homecoming masterpiece The Quiet Man, in which John Wayne played an Irish-American boxer who returns to his ancestral home), Brooklyn feels restorative.
Brooklyn could seem a romantic whitewash of modern gentrification, yet it avoids cynicism, false consciousness, and the rancor that comes with political correctness.
Eilis lives in a boarding house and gets a job at a department store. Her situation is unlike the spiritually ugly post-WWII store scenes in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. She is advantaged with cultural security derived from an Irish Catholic enclave, and her homesickness is especially moving given the repression she has escaped and the succor she finds. Her romance with Tony (Emory Cohen), a second-generation Italian-American apprentice plumber, is an American dream indeed — integration and renewal. Decency such as this is scarce these days. It’s evident in Eilis’s open face and plain-spoken manner, which make her look older (as she is taller) than Tony, who speaks in a crude but chivalrous ghetto argot. (“Why are you being ‘amenable’?” he asks, courting while social-climbing.) When a date to see Singin’ in the Rain (also 1952) finishes with flirtatious Tony hanging on a lamp post like Gene Kelly at his most ardent, their lark evokes cultural depths.
About the European Caucasian experience of assimilation, Brooklyn could seem a romantic whitewash of modern gentrification, yet it avoids cynicism, false consciousness, and the rancor that comes with political correctness. Perhaps only non-American filmmakers would dare this optimistic skepticism and simplicity. Crowley connects characters through sentiment — a tears-and-letters motif that climaxes with bad news read in a halo of sunshine and dust motes.
Eilis remains a figure of Old World nostalgia. A return home reminds her both of her reasons for leaving and of her longing for what she has found. Brooklyn is slight but beguiling — just an anecdote, really. But its single-minded outsider’s sentiment about innocence, sincerity, and self-awareness is welcome.
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Disillusionment ruins Spotlight from the start. Focusing on the Boston Globe’s 2002 exposé of child-abuse scandals in Boston’s archdiocese, director and co-writer Tom McCarthy falls into typical indie-filmmaker traps: He presumes that advocacy equals artistic and moral efficacy. McCarthy also imitates All the President’s Men, the one 1970s film (other than Network) most responsible for influencing the worst movies of the millennium by filmmakers who think themselves politically enlightened when they’re merely flaunting cynicism. “We’re going after the System,” says the Globe’s new editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber). Yet McCarthy doesn’t see the System before his eyes (the Globe’s all-white editorial board) because he’s too busy looking for the ghosts of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman’s Woodward and Bernstein.
Spotlight’s crusading journalists and activists are played by a cast of actors you can no longer trust: Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo, and Stanley Tucci carry disingenuousness in their make-up kits, each one dragging the shadows of so many earlier untenable movies. Smugness is just beneath the surface of their characters’ “dedication.” McCarthy isn’t cunning enough to film them with sharp insight or have them convincingly express indignation. An ironic “Silent Night” montage of reporters toiling to break the sex-abuse story while a children’s choir sings the hymn ends with Ruffalo looking at the children protectively. Tactics like this make Spotlight dull more than offensive.
This dull/offensive paradox (right after the Cate Blanchett journalist movie Truth, where it was difficult to tell if it was low-budget or just morally cheap) derives from the folly of disillusioned filmmaking following the 2000 presidential election and 9/11: Scandal mongering is no longer distinguished from ethical journalism. Thus, the investigative-reporter genre (from Michael Moore mockumentaries to Zodiac) has become an excuse for nihilism. Behind the shallow, self-congratulatory thinking of Spotlight is banal, politically correct resentment of religion, centered on the Catholic Church.
This is how pop-culture nihilism gets accepted as a norm — trauma to fight trauma.
Spotlight, titled after the Globe’s muckraking column, trots out the scandal of sexual abuse yet shows only superficial concern for the victims’ horror, while remaining uninterested in the predicament of accused and convicted offenders (dismissed as “a recognized psychological phenomenon”). McCarthy misperceives his own disillusionment and fumbles that of his characters. “I stopped going to Church with Nana,” McAdams regrets. “I get so angry!” And Ruffalo commiserates, “Something just cracked!” No one associated with Spotlight cares to understand why people practice faith or empathize with the effort to sustain devotion. Instead, the ambivalence felt by some modern-day churchgoers has led to hopeless antagonism that Hollywood and the liberal media readily exploit.
#related#This is how pop-culture nihilism gets accepted as a norm — trauma to fight trauma. (No wonder critics derided McCarthy’s Adam Sandler film, The Cobbler; its vision of multi-ethnic connection was as wondrous and unillusioned as Brooklyn.) Journalism has become the new mass opiate that appeases modern disgruntlement. “It’s not just physical abuse, it’s spiritual abuse,” a character says; yet Spotlight is indifferent to the spiritual sustenance that the Catholic Church represents in a film like Brooklyn. When asked, “Where’s the editorial responsibility in publishing this?” Ruffalo, displaying his usual jumble of actorly tics, exhorts, “Where’s the editorial responsibility in not publishing this?” Spotlight is conspicuously short on Shavian wit.
How ironic that the news media, now at the least trustworthy in their history (“It’s ‘deep background’ but it’s a solid source,” a Spotlight editor tells his credulous boss) get celebrated in films that reject faith yet still proclaim journos as protectors of liberty. Spotlight proselytizes for a self-righteous, secular world.