Spotlight (2015)

“You can’t be apologetic.  Not about the things that are important to you,” Jean tells Loretta about halfway into Boston Strangler, a film recently released on Hulu about the famed series of killings that occurred in Boston in the early 1960s.

Based on actual events, Loretta and Jean were two reporters who investigated and covered this brutal series of murders for the "Record American." At the time, women journalists were relegated to fluff pieces and lifestyle features, covering fashion and reviewing household products like microwaves and toasters. Absurdly, men were granted the bulk of serious reporting while women were not given any assignments of great weight, and then socially punished for covering "vapid" topics.

Keira Knightley plays Loretta McLaughlin, a young journalist tired of being relegated to fad diets and profiles of wives of political candidates.  She asks her editor, Jack (played by Chris Cooper), if she can tackle homicide.  More specifically, the murder of three older women.  She even offers to do it in her free time while still covering ‘lifestyle.’

We’re in a very dark world.  Lots of grays, little coloring.  Daylight that seems zapped of warmth and vitality.  Think Seven or Zodiac.  It’s very Fincher-esque.  There are also many scenes of characters in dark corridors or silhouetted in door frames. Invoking secrecy and leaving many quite literally in the dark, searching for answers. 

What is it about certain moody period pieces that often portray characters as sad and very pissed off, smoking cigarettes, lamenting the poor state of the world and its societal boundaries?  As if this setting has to be a mean and unforgiving hell of sorts in order to spawn such mad, emotionally disturbed felons and sickos.  It's thinly veiled commentary.  These movies often stress that things used to be a lot worse and you should be glad to be living in a time where people are ostensibly less miserable, and also less racist and homophobic.  These depictions are effective and very compelling, but they are also a bit of a cliche.  

The year is 1992. A period film is being shot at an Irish beach. A young woman walking along the beach halts to watch the production with a smile on her face. She approaches closer and we see her interact with a few crew members. A sudden cut to a street in Ireland shows the same woman crying, running down the street, clutching her belongings. Later revealed to be the first woman to speak on the record against the then-famed, now-hated Hollywood producer Mr. Harvey Weinstein (played by Mike Houston), these two scenes of Lola Petticrew as a young Laura Madden introduce us to the world of director Maria Schrader’s latest film She Said.

She Said is a film based on the book of the same name written by New York Times investigative reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning article about Harvey Weinstein’s pattern of misconduct towards women. It stars Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan as the two reporters respectively and Patricia Clarkson as the team’s editor, Rebecca Corbett. The New York Times’ executive director from 2017, Dean Baquet, is played by Andre Braugher and a brilliant Jennifer Ehle appears as the adult Laura Madden. After the emotional opener, She Said takes a bit of a confusing path to arrive at the beginning of the actual story. It depicts Twohey on a phone call with Donald Trump after she’s published a piece about sexual harassment allegations against him. It then cuts to her being jaded by the fact that he is elected anyway. Soon after, we’re seeing her pregnant and giving birth. We don’t really see Jodi in action until around this time, when we see the New York Times employers huddled around a TV, watching Bill O’Reilly being forced out of Fox News for sexual misconduct. Next, we see Dean and Rebecca tell a room full of journalists to look for more stories on workplace sexual harassment.

It’s soon after when Kantor introduces Rebecca to a possible story about Rose McGowan claiming Harvey Weinstein harassed her that the film’s plot really starts developing. Once we get there though, the ball keeps rolling and never slows down till the end credits start rolling. It’s like a “buckle your seatbelts” moment because despite being a dialogue-heavy and minimalist independent film, She Said feels like a thriller. We follow a couple of hardworking and passionate reporters who talk to many scared and scarred women, trying to find a source who is willing to take a public stance against the biggest name in Hollywood. It’s an underdog story at its core, but also one rooted in social reform. Megan and Jodi’s work spearheaded a rebellion of sorts that culminated in the #MeToo movement.  For those who don’t know the full story, the film is even more fun to watch because it takes time to trace the development of the story from a whisper about Harvey to a collective testament of his pattern of behavior.

I imagine that it would be a dream job for an actor to play the parts of twin brothers Dominick and Thomas Birdsey in I Know This Much Is True. They are both deeply complex and multifaceted characters, while also being starkly different from each other. There is so much room there for an actor to play within, and to shine as they give two nuanced and powerful performances. In the case of HBO’s six part limited series, the lucky actor who gets to take this on is Mark Ruffalo.

I have been a fan of Ruffalo for a long time. He first popped up on my radar when he debuted as Bruce Banner in The Avengers (2012). Since then, I have been nothing short of amazed by his truly raw talent. His performances in movies such as Begin Again (2013), Foxcatcher (2014), and Spotlight (2015) — the latter two garnering him Oscar nominations — cemented him for me as one of my favorite working actors. Anything that Mark Ruffalo is in will immediately have my attention.

In I Know This Much Is True, Dominick (Ruffalo) struggles to care for his paranoid schizophrenic brother, Thomas (Ruffalo). The more Dominick fights to help his brother, the more he feels he is losing the war. It’s within his moments of absolute loss and devastation that we see who Dominick truly is as a person.

As the series progresses, we also come to learn more about Dominick’s past. His relationships with his brother, his stepfather Ray (John Procaccino), his ex-wife Dessa (Kathryn Hahn), and his mother (Melissa Leo) all have secrets that are slowly unearthed. That is the biggest aspect of I Know This Much Is True that makes it as compelling as it is: the secrets and mysteries that take their time to be fully revealed.