My Brilliant Friend a Poignant Portrait of Postwar Naples

MY BRILLIANT FRIEND (2012/15)

Elena Ferrante

Europe Edition, 331 pages

* * * *

Even today Naples is a place where dreams die swift and hard. Is it a municipality of 3.1 million, or 3.1 million anarchists haphazardly thrown into the same 45 square miles? As Western European cities go, Naples–like Marseille, Palermo, or Liverpool–invites adjectives such as "tough" and "gritty." It simultaneously fascinates and horrifies; nothing quite works, yet everyone is cheerfully resigned to muddling through as best they can.

Let's just say that muddling through was considerably harder in the 1950s, a time in which Italy was struggling with its recent fascist past and cleaning up wartime devastation. The Camorra thrived in the vacuum left by effective government and was about the only thing that did thrive. Naples is the setting for Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, a novel that's like a Vittorio De Sica film set to type. The novel was originally published in 2012, but is now in a new edition as Ferrante has just published The Story of the Lost Child, the final book in a tetralogy known as "The Neapolitan Novels." Its glowing reviews have set Ferrante novices such as myself back to book one, My Brilliant Friend.

The book centers on the friendship between two girls, Elena and Lila, who grow up in a poor yet lively Naples neighborhood. The expectation for most girls is an elementary school education, then work, early marriage, and motherhood. To get beyond the sixth grade, as Elena manages, involves passing rigorous exams, scrapping together tuition money, borrowing grubby books, and working with tutors to master subjects such as Latin, Greek grammar, English, and philosophy. What are the chances that the daughter of a shoemaker can do this?

My Brilliant Friend is often hailed as a story of female friendship and so it is, but it's far more than this. In the hands of a lesser writer the story might be little more than a hardship versus perseverance tale; in Ferrante's hands the struggle to acquire knowledge is a mere foil for peeling back the layers of a Neapolitan onion for its textures, cadences, smells, and daily struggles for survival. It's also about the randomness of life's chances. As Lila prepares for marriage at age 16, she calls Elena "my brilliant friend," which we recognize as doubly ironic as it is she, not Elena, who should be the scholar. Elena is bright enough, but it's Lila who is her greatest tutor–the one who borrows Latin grammar books from the library to tutor Elena. Lila is stoic on the surface, but is she also vicariously living her first best destiny through Elena? Place our two characters in the insalde miste context of a neighborhood of ex-fascists, pastry chefs, low-level criminals, casual workers, poets, widows, housewives, tinkers, beggars, and ironclad patriarchy and you have a book that feels 'bigger' and more sprawling than its 331 pages. 

It's also as enigmatic as Ferrante, a beloved author whose identity is unknown and might not even be female, though the author claims (on the web) to be a mother.  Ferrante is a heck of a writer, whoever he or she might be. My Brilliant Friend skirts the edges of magical realism without actually going there, a deft bit of writing that bathes characters and circumstances in a glow that's also quite Neapolitan. Imagine growing up in Naples but never visiting the sea until you are well into your teens. Imagine living under skies that dazzle, but knowing more darkness than light. Imagine and dream, but don't trust the latter.

Don't believe any remarks that pigeonhole My Brilliant Friend in that sexist sinkhole labeled "chick lit." It's about humanity and I look forward to wending my way through the three remaining books. From where I now sit, Elena Ferrante feels like an Italian Marcel Pagnol. 

Rob Weir  

Ayes and Nays: Recent Releases

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Folk rock generally occupies the "warm" end of the sunny to gloomy spectrum. Think artists such as Crosby, Stills & Nash, Jackson Browne, Arlo Guthrie, The Youngbloods, The Byrds, The Decemberists, or Great Big Sea. Perhaps, most of all, think James Taylor. And think Pat McGee. He's been around since 1995 and has followed the usual folk rock path: get signed by a major label, get dumped by it, leave the fast lane, and find peace as an indie artist.

            I invoked Taylor because McGee's repertoire and voice are strongly reminiscent of Taylor's. His is a soothing voice especially strong in the high register and with the same reedy assonance as Taylor. He even builds a song the same way—a nice smooth groove building to up-the-scale drama, cut to some harmonies, and let the music wash over like a soothing bath. Heck, on "Take the Long WayHome" (not the Supertramp song!), he even invokes Massachusetts. His song "Kite String" is a soft rock/PG-13 blues number akin to Taylor's "Steamroller Blues." I don't mean to suggest that McGee is derivative—his band is cooler, to note one difference—but the resemblance to Taylor is uncanny. McGee is on the road again these days and has a new 5-song EP, Pat McGee (Noble Steed Music), to go with the tour. He's well worth catching. Check out "Overboard," which features old friend Pat Monahan from Train on vocals and guitar. Aye.

Tow'rs is also (sort of) in the folk rock vein. Its new album The Great Minimum (Tow'rs Music) is a polished affair finds an introspective seam between arty and traditional. This five-piece group from Flagstaff, Arizona, is anchored by the husband/wife duo of Kyle and Gretta Miller. They, along with three friends, are often reviewed as a "Christian" band, though they are not preachy, and their repertoire is more of a secular-meets-mystical blend. I suppose the Christian music crowd likes them because the songs are rated PG and many of them drop the message that home may not be on this mortal coil. Their best songs, such "The Swan and the East" and "The Boy and His Shadow" have the country/folk-rock feel of early Neil Young, though Kyle Miller's voice would be the silk to Young's gravel. Mostly the songs deal with love or the transitory nature of life,and are populated by lines such as "Is there an answer in the silence/Are we asking the wrong questions?" and "…man is but a breath hanging by his skin." The album's major downside is that, like many inward-looking projects, it's heavier on musing than music. It's all skillfully done but since much of it is cut from the same cloth, you might not recall a single melody a half hour after listening. In the end, some listeners may find it better contemplated than consumed.  Aye/nay (It depends on whether you enjoy the entire introspective folk rock genre.)

Bridge 19 hails form Louisville, Kentucky, and is a band on the rise that has shared the stage with the likes of Richard Thompson, Brandi Carlile, and Sarah McLachlan. Their new CD, Riding on a Wire (Bridge 19), is full of verve that comes at you with country/folk/pop chops. Amanda Lucas and Audrey Cecil, who write most of the material, and handle lead and harmony vocals, anchor Bridge 19. Both have voices best suited to quick tempo selections such as "Chain" and "Nothing Else." The interplay of vocals, guitar, and percussion is especially crisp on the latter. Call this music without a lot of empty spaces, pull up your socks, and get down. Aye 

I'm a Juliana Hatfield fan—of her mature work. Once upon a time (1986-91), though, she was a member of the Blake Babies, which attracted brief notice. My attention span was briefer; I thought the Blake Babies (Hatfield, Freda Love, John Strohan, and sometimes Evan Dando) one of the worst bands I'd ever heard. Noisetrade offers a free download of the Blake Babies Live, 1989, so I thought I'd reconsider. Now I think they might actually be the worst band I've ever heard! Hatfield became a good artist, but back then her voice was thin and her ear was tin. The Blake Babies emerged at the dying tail end of the grunge heyday, back when audiences were growing impatient with sloppy DIY music and a lot of bands were cleaning up their acts in (the mostly vain) hope of commercial success. Call it a lost period and never dial that number again. Nay. Cick here for a track

Old Man Canyon is mostly Vancouver's Jeff Pace, a changing ensemble, and lots of technology. OMC is trying to whip up enthusiasm for a new project called Delirium and has been sending out its 2013 EP Phantoms and Friends in support of it. My take is that OMC, which integrates sonic loops, synthesizers, visuals, and projections on stage, would be more interesting to watch live than to listen to on its own. At his best, Jett's work evokes a band such as Darlingside, but without the latter's ability not to take itself too seriously. The music sets mood and ambiance and there are pleasant vocals, though they are immersed in such a thick sonic soup it's often hard to know what they're about. The music seeks to be alt.folk, but it often comes off as a hipster with too many toys. Nay.

Make Me: A Middlebrow Page Turner

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MAKE ME (2015)

Lee Child

Delacorte Press, 416 pages, 978-08041478778

* * *

Make Me is book number twenty in Lee Child's Jack Reacher mystery series. For Jack Reacher novices–or those who know the character only from Tom Cruise's limp movie portrayal– Reacher is what you might get if you crossed Robert Parker's Spenser with Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan sans the rah-rah flag-waving propensities. He doesn't play games and he doesn't care for convention, external judgment, or social niceties; when he unjustly fell under a cloud of suspicion, he resigned his Army commission and never looked back. Since 1997 Reacher has been drifting with no permanent address and only the clothes on his back. (When they become dirty, he buys new.) Like Spenser, his handle is his last name–no one has ever called him Jack. If you like tough-guy mysteries, Reacher fits the bill and the build–he's a large man with lethal-quick reflexes and always on the alert—as anyone would be who drinks as much coffee as he.  

You don't really need to know any of this to enjoy Make Me, a stand-alone novel that fills in the past where it's needed. Its basic premise is that sometimes adventure and danger find you even if you're not looking for them. Reacher is drifting between odd jobs and finds himself on a train rattling across an empty quadrant of Oklahoma so monotonous that the lights from a late-night piece of machinery provide brief entertainment. Reacher decides to get off the train at the next station solely because of its name: Mother's Rest. The grand plan is to learn why it bears such an odd name and then catch the next train out.  

That would make an awfully short book, wouldn't it? Instead he meets Michelle Chang, who initially mistakes Reacher for Keever, a man she's supposed to assist but hasn't showed up. Treat yourself to a cup of coffee if you're guessing the name of Mother's Rest isn't the oddest thing about the town. Buy yourself another cup if you think the story Chang tells Reacher makes him miss the train. Take the entire pot if you imagine the two of them will become partners (and more).

Chang is a lot like Reacher: solidly built, a stranger to fashion, a loner, and a PI forced out of the FBI by shady superiors. Our anti-glam pair set off to solve a case that begins with the question of Keever's whereabouts and veers into anhedonia, cryptic references to 200 deaths, the Deep Web, a Ukrainian mobster, a Los Angeles Times science writer, a suicide support network, and side trips to Chicago, LA, Oklahoma City, and San Francisco. At every step of the way, all signs point back to Mother's Rest and something even more sinister. But what?   

Child—the nom de plume for British writer Jim Grant–is very good at building suspense. He won't dazzle you with sterling prose or sparkling dialogue–Reacher is more laconic than the wisecracking Spenser and more jaded than Ryan­–but Child's books are plotted in ways that make you keep turning the pages, even though you suspect that what you're reading is on the lowbrow border of the middlebrow stop on the literature spectrum. Like many mystery novels, Make Me is best enjoyed with your improbability and skepticism meters set on low. Tolerance for the grisly is also in order. And don't go ballistic over the MacGuffins–one of which is the title, which seems to have been chosen for no reason other than it sounds like what one might name a hard-boiled detective novel.  

This book is exactly what it appears to be: a frisson-inducing diversion you can read in two or three sittings. It's pulp fiction, not college lit material; a guilty pleasure, not an intellectual workout. Go for it–at this time of the year it won't be the least nutritious thing you consume.  Rob Weir  

Concussion (loosely) Tackles the NFL's Unspoken Problem

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CONCUSSION  (2015)

Directed by Peter Landesman

Columiba, 122 minutes, PG-13 (violence)

* * *

If you were buying a new car and read that a particular brand had a 28% chance of blowing up, would you buy it? If a drug caused 28% of its users to suffer such serious side effects that suicides ensued, would the FDA approve it? Now consider that we have such a product/drug going out to tens of millions of addicts every Sunday: the National Football League.

Concussion is a sports/biopic film that spotlights Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith), a rising Nigerian-born pathologist living in Pittsburgh. His immigrant dream receives a rude shock in 2002; on his dissection slab lies Mike Webster, a Hall of Fame center for the Steelers who died a broken-down bum at the age of 50. The initial verdict, cardiac arrest, made no sense to Dr. Omalu, so he decided, over the objections of several football-loving colleagues, to take a look inside Webster's brain. Dr. Omalu found intensive brain trauma, the likes of which could have easily led Webster to drugs, glue-sniffing, and antisocial behavior. Concussion tells the story of how Omalu, former Steelers team doctor Dr. Julian Bailes (Alec Baldwin), Dr. Cyril Wecht (Albert Brooks), Dr. Joseph Maroon (Arliss Howard), and Dr. Steven DeKorsky (Eddie Marsan) wrote the pioneering study of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), which linked repeated concussions to dementia, depression, sociopathic behavior, and suicide.

More harrowing, it shows some of the lengths to which the NFL was willing to go to try to suppress CTE research. In my review of Spotlight, I suggested that the Catholic Church was the biggest crime syndicate in Boston; the NFL might qualify as the biggest mob racket in the nation. Only money can explain why CTE findings were suppressed until one of the conspiracy's doubters, former Players Association chief Dave Duerson committed suicide in 2011 and left a note saying that Dr. Omalu was right. (Junior Seau's suicide hit the front pages a year later.) At several junctures of the film, comparisons are made between the NFL and Big Tobacco's efforts in the 1990s to deny the science of smoking's health effects. Yes, we're talking that level of evil.  

Concussion is a good film. I wish I could tell you it was a great one, but that would be false. Will Smith is fabulous as Dr. Omalu–so good, that we instantly stop seeing the star and think of Smith as an African man with a lilting accent honed in British universities. His is one of the better portrayals of the pure scientist's naïveté: the blind faith that reason and science speak an objective voice immune to politics, power, and money. Smith would probably be considered a Best Actor Oscar favorite were the film better than it is.

Alas, Director Peter Landesman pulls punches he should roundhouse. The film is as much about Omalu's relationship with his eventual wife, Kenyan immigrant Prema Mutiso (Guyu Mbatha-Raw), as it is about the NFL. Ms. Mbatha-Raw is also very good, but she's central where she ought to be secondary. The film ought to be less about romance and more about dirty deeds. The attempts to quash the truth certainly took a toll on the Omalu household, but the story of Concussion should be like Spotlight–about the cover-up, not domestic life under the covers and about masses, not just individuals. Speaking of cover-ups, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell (underplayed by Luke Wilson) ought to be a central villain in the script, not a mostly silent presence. It's also rather hard not to gag over some of the overwrought snap-ons about the meaning of America through immigrant eyes. So too are obligatory references to the "beauty" and "grace" of football–sentiments completely at odds with the ugliness of Dr. Omalu's findings.

By mixing romance with science, Concussion cheapens the latter. It also allows too much wiggle room for football lovers to imagine that the NFL (or, indeed, science) has "fixed" the problem. Not so. The day I viewed the film, the Boston Globe ran a front-page story about Syracuse University quarterback A. J. Long, who–per university rules–was banned from football after suffering his third concussion. You might call that the least that can be done to address CTE, but Long and others like him have been actively recruited by other colleges willing to overlook a mere three concussions. Concussion might/should have asked hard questions about the American addiction to sports that sanction the sacrifice of young bodies for the vicarious thrills of spectators  (Why, for example, doesn't hockey ban fighting or full-body checking? Why do we watch the UFC?) It ignores the question of whether we are any better than ancient Romans signifying thumbs-down at a gladiator spectacle. Nor does it help explain why there were a scant dozen people in the movie theater on NFL Sunday. Concussion is a decent movie, but it fumbled the chance to be a landmark film. Rob Weir

Postscript for parents: See this film, especially if you have sons. Buy those sons baseball mitts and soccer balls. Football? Can you justify a one in four chance your son will suffer brain damage?

The Danish Girl: More Surface than Substance

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THE DANISH GIRL (2015)

Directed by Tom Hooper

Focus Films, 119 minutes, R (nudity, sexual themes)

* * *

The Danish Girl released at a time of new frankness over gender dysphoria, but it's hard to imagine it will do much to advance the cause of social acceptance. It tells the story of Lili Elbe, who in 1930 underwent what is thought to be the Western world's first male-to-female sexual reassignment surgery. It's a fascinating tale featuring luminous cinematography, but clouded by a muddy script.

Einar Wegener

Eddie Redmayne, winner of last year's Best Actor Oscar for The Theory of Everything, portrays Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe (1883-1931). As Wegener, Einar achieved minor renown as a painter in his native Denmark, as did his illustrator/painter wife, Gerda Gottlieb (1885-1940), whom he married in 1904. The Danish Girl opens in 1926, with Einar and Gerda (Alicia Vikander) living a life of lusty semi-poverty in Copenhagen. Their erotic bliss takes a dramatic U-turn when Gerda asks Einar to don women's stockings to help her finish a portrait for which her model was late. In the film, this awakens deep yearnings and doubts. When Gerda later suggests Einar dress as a woman as a lark for a party, that's all she wrote. In 1930, Einar went to Germany for operations that made him into Lili for real. In between, the film seeks to wrestle with Einar's pre-op disappearance into womanhood, the stresses on the Wegener marriage, Gerda's grudging acceptance of her husband's female identity, and her loyal (and way-too-modern) support for his decision to undergo risky medical procedures.

Einar/Lili in life

The script is a load of hogwash insofar as it purports to tell a true story. I'll get back to this, for first let's look at the film as film. Its surfaces are beautiful. Copenhagen is often colored in gray, but not Hooper's frames. The Wegeners' starkly furnished artist atelier serves to make the paintings being produced and backdrop draperies pop off the screen in lush textures and vibrant colors. Cafes are rendered with smoky ambience, ball gowns dazzle, and Lili's red hair and lipstick slash across the screen with such lurid tones as to prefigure the deep cut that will remove Einar's masculinity. Ms. Vikander is also stunning. Redmayne has gotten most of the ink, but Vikander's role is the harder of the two. Redmayne only needs to look the part, but Vikander has to demonstrate a convincing roller coaster ride of emotions. Toss in some sexual frustration, and it's pretty much the Kübler-Ross cycle of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Would that Redmayne had Vikander's range. He's exceedingly androgynous normally, so it's not that hard to cross dress and physically pass as a woman. What we don't see is a whole lot of contemplation or conflict. It's as if we go from stockings to the knife with little in-between other than a crash course in how to act female. Of that—oh dear! I think the word "fay" (and "fey") might have been invented to describe the situation. We see Redmayne aping peep-show girls, staring at his penis-tucked-away nude body in a mirror, and other such activities, but his mannerisms are more those of a swishy late 20^th century gay man than they are those of an early 20^th century female. He also seeks to go back and forth between Einar and Lili, but this often plays like Sibyl and Dr. Jekyll go voguing.  

Lucinda Coxon's script doesn't help matters. Viewers should be aware that the script was based on a novel by David Ebershoff, not a biography. Any time one sees the words "based on a true story," skepticism is in order. So let's set the facts straight (pun intended). Biographers believe that Einar and Gerda probably had a lavender marriage. In the film, Lili rebuffs advances from Henrik (Ben Whishaw) who recognizes her as Einar in drag. No such character existed, but fragmentary evidence suggests Einar would have welcomed such an assignation. Nor was there any such character as Hans Axgil (Matthias Schoenaerts), Einar's childhood friend/flirt and Gerda's alleged post-Einar lover. Gerda painted Lili, bur she was best known for lesbian erotica and was probably lesbian or bisexual. (She remarried after her marriage to Einar was annulled, but to an Italian pilot, not a Danish art dealer, and it was brief.)

The worst deception concerns Lili's death. In the film she dies after a second operation to fashion a vagina. Not so, nor was Gerda with him after his original penectomy. Lili had four operations, the last of which was fatal: a uterus transplant. The idea at the time was that Lili could become a biological woman capable of childbirth. We are still miles from that possibility and, today, only one born a woman can undergo what is still experimental surgery. All of this is to say that The Danish Girl pulls too many punches because it's serving a 21^st century agenda, not retelling 1931 history.

Filmmakers are, of course, under no compulsion to produce historical works. My regret is that neither Hooper nor Redmayne cast enough magic to cover their ahistorical tracks. This isn't a bad film, just an average one. Given such extraordinary material, it should have been more than just a single breakout performance (Vikander) and pretty surfaces.

Rob Weir 

Gerda painting of Lili

Warhol and Mapplethorpe: Controversial People as Posthumous Conservatives?

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The Wadsworth Atheneum will soon close (January 24) a wonderful show: Warhol & Mapplethorpe: Guise & Dolls. Those who don't get a chance to see it might want to check out the exhibition catalog (just $35) for its striking images, but also to muse upon how social mores change; in this case, how radicals lose their rebelliousness when social frames shift.

The Wadsworth show takes a sometimes-voyeuristic peek inside New York City's fluid gender identities scene during the 1970s and 1980s. Warhol, of course, was openly gay, sometimes flamboyantly so, whereas Mapplethorpe transitioned from bisexuality to exclusive homosexuality. Along the way, both artists explored sexual role-playing, androgyny, and the blurred lines of gender identity.

The Andy Warhol (1928-1987) side of the show demonstrates how Warhol's Polaroids of drag queens became his 1975 "Ladies and Gentlemen" series. Here we see Warhol as an artistic trickster who used the media of painting and printing to obliterate sexual identities that are clear in the photographs. Men wearing bad wigs and sporting five o'clock shadows become glam subjects once the medium changes. The show also puts Warhol himself behind the camera–Christopher Makos' "Altered Images" photos in which Warhol strikes poses in his street clothes, but wearing makeup. He stares blankly at the camera, the effect of which is to locate him somewhere in the androgynous middle between male and female. This is quintessential Warhol, an emotion-dumped ennui that makes us wonder whether he has a point or is simply too lazy to make one. It's the flip side of the perpetual question of whether Warhol was a serious artist, or just a person with enough talent to dabble at being one.

There is no such reservation over Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989), who had as much talent as anyone who has ever picked up a camera. Two highlights of the show are his images of rock-poet Patti Smith and female body-builder Lisa Lyon. There are also shots of friends in gender-bending poses and BDSM shots of himself. The latter were the images that led to the 1990 First Amendment controversy in Cincinnati. In the end, the First Amendment triumphed, but the BDSM images are hard to view even now. I wonder, actually, if it might have been wise to have skipped them–not because I wish to censor, but because the Smith/Lyon series is more in keeping with the guise theme and Mapplethorpe's homoerotic images are unambiguous. The Smith photos stun because Smith is the ultimate malleable subject, a figure that could be butch one moment, intersexual the next, and classically (even demurely) feminine when she wished to be. In like fashion, Lyon simply explodes notions about the female body. Or does she? The exhibit has what is now seems a rather overwrought piece of film in which Mapplethorpe presents Lyon as a woman who becomes a statue—but a statuesque one that becomes an archetype of female beauty.

Hearing anything conservative in all of this?  On the surface, Warhol and Mapplethorpe appear to be ahead of their time. But here's the deal: I doubt this exhibit could be shown on a college campus these days–students would be outraged at both men's take on gender. If curator Patricia Hickson is to be believed, Warhol and Mapplethorpe saw gender as "a performance," and a conscious one at that. They had little sense of or interest in gender being anything other than a piece of theater. Although each would have defended freedom of choice—Warhol passively and Mapplethorpe openly–biology was not the issue that animated them. To put it in blunt terms, each would have agreed with today's conservatives that presenting gender was a "lifestyle choice." Their "So what?" rejoinder would have led to quick parted company, but it's hard to imagine either having a lot in common with those whose guises are chalked up to gender dysphoria. In their minds, art, gender, and theater were inextricably fused.  

 

This is, admittedly, partly speculative on my part. Maybe each would have adjusted, even applauded expanded articulations of gender. (It's hard for me to imagine Warhol applauding anything!) The exhibit quotes Patti Smith's wonderful aphorism, "As far as I'm concerned, being any gender is a drag." That's catchy and clever, but would it satisfy those today who are deadly serious about transgender issues? Or, is the most anachronistic thing about the exhibit the innocence of approaching gender identity in an ironic, humorous, and self-absorbed fashion?

Rob Weir

Spotlight on the Catholic Church in McCarthy's Important Film

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SPOTLIGHT (2015)

Directed by Tom McCarthy

Spotlight Films, 129 minutes, R (Sexual abuse themes)

* * * * *

The best film of 2015 is playing at a mall near you, but it's not titled Star Wars. Avoid the long lines, costumed geeks, and Gen Xers reliving their childhoods, and see Spotlight, the film about how a team of Boston Globe reporters blew the whistle on pedophile priests. Forget films such as Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, and The Departed, the biggest organized crime syndicate in Beantown was the Roman Catholic Church.

Spotlight takes its name from a column produced by Globe investigative reporters. In 2001, four of them–Walter "Robby" Robinson (Michael Keaton), Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), and Ben Bradlee, Jr. (John Slattery) ––were at work on their usual shtick of exposing corrupt cops and crooked pols, when  two things happened: Father John Geoghan was arrested for child abuse, and the Globe hired a new editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber). Though a cheerless soul, Baron was a breath of fresh air across Back Bay–a man with a serious nose for news, a non-native unimpressed by insider complacency, and a Jew in a Catholic town. To Baron, Geoghan smelled like something cast from the middle of the barrel, not a single rotten fish, and he was right. Before the Globe collected a fistful of Pulitzers in 2003, more than 290 pedophile priests were fingered–a stunning one of seven within the Archdiocese of Boston. Even more distressing was that that a decades-long cover-up took place with the full knowledge of one of the most powerful prelates in North America: Cardinal Bernard Francis Law. Spotlight tells the sordid tale of how the Church's power, wealth, and cozy relations with Boston elites swept pedophilia under the rug.

Star Wars made more money in advance sales than this film has made since November, but Spotlight should be must-see viewing for all Americans. Many have stayed away because–let's face it–pedophilia is a distressing subject. Several friends have told me they couldn't watch a film about kids being abused. Rest assured–you won't.  Director Tom McCarthy steers well clear of all things graphic or salacious. There are no ominous scenes of priests hovering over little boys, no shadowy reenactments, and no melodramatic music presaging a child in danger. Spotlight is about the investigation, not the activity, and most of the action takes place inside the Globe, not inside the Church. It is, in essence, this generation's All the President's Men, Alan Pakula's 1976 drama of the Washington Post's investigation of Watergate. There's even a Deep Throat-like character, whose identity I'll leave you to discover. By extension Spotlight is a warning about the dangers of theocracy.  After all, the Church needed cooperation from other social institutions, including both City Hall and the pre-Marty Baron Globe, to maintain its house of cardinals. In other words, this film won't traumatize you, but it will make you quake with righteous anger.

Speaking of righteousness, Spotlight depicts a Catholic Church in the throes of a might-makes-right ethical crisis. This means it's a film about mental and spiritual abuse as much as physical violation. The Church's overarching grip helps us understand the many years of silence by the abused and their families. Imagine growing up in a world in which, as one victim put it, attracting the attention of a priest was like having God personally speak to you. In many ways, the power of the Church was analogous to the grip of the Mafia–there are some things about which one simply does not speak. Getting a glimpse of power's ebb and flow is reason enough to see Spotlight. And seeing how that power erodes in the face of corruption, awakened conscience, and calcified practices (such as celibacy and sacerdotalism) is another. As for breaking the silence, muse upon the anger of working-class adults from South Boston who have never set foot on Beacon Hill being lied to by the very institution that promised eternal reward.

This is, after all, a movie, so are there filmic reasons to watch? Plenty. First of all, it's well directed. I would think Spotlight a lock for the Best Picture Oscar, and McCarthy has to be the odds-on favorite for Best Director. We know how this ends. If I might, it was in all the papers. McCarthy's greatest trick is to keep us on the edge of our seats for a film filled with memes hurtling toward a foregone conclusion. It is so artfully done that we seldom notice when McCarthy pulls out the usual stops: near dead-ends that conveniently resolve, tearful confessions, lifted veils of fear, overcoming giant obstacles, beat-the-clock triumphs….

Unless I miss my guess badly, numerous cast members will join McCarthy on the Oscar podium. Mark Ruffalo is absolutely superlative and should win as Best Actor. Both Keaton and Schreiber are likely Best Supporting Actor nods, and McAdams might snare (and would deserve) Best Supporting Actress honors. The entire ensemble is so good that, by necessity, several stellar performances will be overlooked, so give a shout out to Billy Crudup as Church legal fixer Eric MacLeish, and Stanley Tucci as victims' lawyer Mitchell Garabedian.

But also watch this film so you understand why America needs newspapers. A healthy republic requires an informed and skeptical public. Ask yourself what blogger or TV reporter could have done investigative reporting analogous to that of the Globe. Even devout Catholics should be grateful to the Spotlight team. Draw a line from this story to Pope Francis (though he's yet to discredit the odious Cardinal Law). Put simply, without newspapers, the Monsters win. Put down that plastic light saber and educate yourselves, Citizens.

Rob Weir