"Spotlight": A Love Letter

Stephen Sondheim has three tips for good writing:

1. God is in the details.
2. Less is more.
3. Content dictates form.

It's useful to consider these tips in relation to "Spotlight," which has one of my favorite screenplays.

-God is in the details. This script shows us Mark Ruffalo asking Michael Keaton, "Are you golfing?" Keaton says, "Golfing is not a verb." We know this conversation has happened before. We know Keaton is precise and mildly irritated. We know Ruffalo is absent-minded and could not care less. We also know we are in a world of writers, where the issue of "to golf" would be, well, an issue. Masterful.

Rachel McAdams will struggle to reconcile her journalistic duties with her ties to her Catholic family. We see this right away, with a chat about "Father" at the dinner table, tense murmuring during a dish-washing session, McAdams seeming watchful and strained at Sunday mass. (And McAdams doesn't do any over-the-top hand-wringing. Less is more.)

-Content dictates form. This is a detective story. As such, we get a mysterious, half-explained depiction of the crime in the very first scene. (The young red-headed cop is our avatar; like the viewer, the young cop is a fish-out-of-water. His questions are our questions. A stranger comes to town.)

Then, as in any great detective story, we get the outsider struggling to understand/disentangle the threads of the coverup. Liev Schreiber's character--a bigwig from NYC--can't quite figure out why Bostonians are so tight-lipped about the Church. What does it mean that Law gives him (Schreiber) a Catechism? How does he (Schreiber) command his weirdly reluctant underlings to pursue the Church story (without acting like he is issuing a command)?

"Spotlight" is as much a story about collusion and looking the other way as it is a story about pedophilia. The laziness and cowardice of some otherwise-decent people: These items are front-and-center.

-Less, less, less. Ruffalo cranes his neck to view a colleague's computer screen. The colleague gently says: "Why don't you go be curious somewhere else?" We know immediately what the rapport between these two is like--and we know it without a big YOU'RE ALWAYS DOING THIS! speech.

Less. Less. Cardinal Law gives out a BS story about being a good friend of Medgar Evers, then thrusts a catechism at Schreiber. "Boston works best when our great institutions are functioning in tandem." What can these gestures mean? Their indirect nature is alarming. The writers create a sinister aura by *refusing* to hit us over the head with portentousness.

Less. Michael Keaton tells Ruffalo to get a hobby. "I run." Keaton: "Yes. You *run* to the office." We learn so much about Ruffalo's hunger, and perhaps his instability, from these early, slightly prickly scenes. The script has given us someone we feel we know--someone who is not a cartoon.

Not news! This movie won the Best Picture Oscar. But it's nice to reconsider a classic, now and then. Fiction, at its best, seems as relentless as a dream; watch "Spotlight," and ask yourself if that's not what is happening here.

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Liars and Saints

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