TIFF 2015: This Fall, Journalists Are Hollywood's New Superheroes

Michael Keaton in ‘Spotlight,’ Cate Blanchett in ‘Truth’, and Chris O’Dowd in ‘The Program’

In the past three decades, there have been top-tier films chronicling the workplace heroism of just about every profession imaginable: Lawyers, doctors, sea pirates, even serial killers. But there have been remarkably few movies about reporters — or, at least, movies in which reporters were portrayed as anything other than either parasites or plot-propelling explainers. This is partly because, in a time when most people get their news from cable-news shout-fests, journalists don’t exactly make for sympathetic figures. But it’s also because of the large (and appropriately shadowy) specter cast by All the President’s Men, the classic 1976 thriller that’s long been considered the gold standard of journeyman-journalist films; in the decades since its release, only a handful of dramas — including 1999’s The Insider,  2005’s Good Night and Good Luck, and 2007’s Zodiac — headed into newsrooms in search of a story.

At this week’s Toronto International Film Festival, though, three high-profile, potentially awards-bound new films — Spotlight, Truth, and The Program — depict journalists as not only admirable, but almost super-powered. They’re white-collar crusaders who tackle, with varying degrees of success, such Ultron-sized powers as the church, the corporate state, and the profit-mad sports industry. The movies’ simultaneous debuts may be a simple coincidence, of course. But they also just happen to be fulfill a primal moviegoing need: For the most part in these films, the good guys get the bad guys — and once they’re caught, there’s no chance for a sequel-spawned comeback.

Of the trio of films, Spotlight is perhaps the most clear-cut, and the most deeply satisfying, a rigorously detailed true story about a team of investigative journalists at the Boston Globe who, in the fall of 2001, uncovered a decades-old Catholic Church sex-abuse scandal. Though the reporters and editors — played by Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo, and Brian d’Arcy James — are all lapsed Catholics, there’s very little hand-wringing about their task: Spotlight is a procedural, one that sends its investigators to every corner of the city, from the palatial homes of high-powered clergymen to stench-filled basement libraries.

The cast of ‘Spotlight’: Keaton, Liev Schreiber, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, John Slattery, and Brian d’Arcy James (Photo: TIFF)

And though the Globe staffers are taking on a crime of horrific scope, with several spread-out but interconnected villains, there are no grandstanding speeches or forced “gotcha” moments; instead, writer-director Tom McCarthy stages the film’s biggest moments as conversational rather than confrontational. Secrets are revealed via unspoken confessions in a law firm’s gleaming conference room, and threats are lodged, discreetly, at congenial bar-side get-togethers. That the reporters and editors of Spotlight surmount so many odds and dead ends with little showmanship or ego-squabbles makes their quiet victory at the end all the more invigorating; ultimately, this is a movie less about the rigors of daily journalism, and more about the small joys of watching smart, decent people doing their job well.

Truth, which was written and directed by Zodiac screenwriter James Vanderbilt, is a bit more fuzzy when it comes to who’s right and who’s wrong. Starring Robert Redford as CBS veteran Dan Rather and Cate Blanchett as 60 Minutes producer Mary Mapes, Truth chronicles a controversial 2004 news report alleging that then-president George W. Bush had gone AWOL while serving in the Texas Air National Guard — a story that ultimately led to Rather’s resignation and Mapes’s dismissal.

The movie is based on Mapes’s 2005 memoir, but she’s not a purely sympathetic figure. Though depicted as smart, indefatigable, and driven by the memories of an abusive father who always told her to keep quiet, Mapes in Truth is so obsessed with locking down the story that she’s blinded to some of its smaller details. (It doesn’t help Mapes that, in Truth’s telling, the network rushed the story to air before it was airtight.)

Blanchett and Robert Redford in ‘Truth’ (Photo: TIFF)

As a result, the first half of Truth is concerned with Mapes and her team (including Dennis Quaid and Elisabeth Moss) securing the documents they need to prove Bush went AWOL; the second half shows them scrambling to find out what went wrong with their reporting, as their increasingly under-fire bosses abandon them. At one point, Blanchett must defend herself to a gloomy room full of patronizing middle-aged white men who’ve been hired to discredit her; even if you wince at some of the oversights committed by Mapes in Truth, it’s a brutal railroading.

Truth will likely be greeted with a gazillion outraged online screeds when it opens this fall, especially as it depicts Rather’s role in Rathergate as largely hands-off (if you’re a thinkpiece generator, you may want to lock down that “Why Robert Redford’s Truth’ is Problematic” headline as soon as possible). But even if the movie gets bogged down in Selma-style fact-kvetching, its bigger point — that truth is a noble pursuit, no matter how messy the process, or how severe the consequences — will likely resonate with viewers, regardless of their political leanings.

There are no such ambiguities about who the good guy is in The Program, in which Ben Foster stars as fabulist jerkwad Lance Armstrong, with Chris O’Dowd (Bridesmaids) playing the newspaper reporter David Walsh, who became suspicious of Armstrong’s cycling prowess early on in the athlete’s career. Unlike Spotlight and Truth, the journalistic battle in The Program is largely mano a mano: After Walsh publishes a book alleging the Armstrong’s doping, he’s sued for libel, dressed down by a sneering Armstrong in a press conference, and abandoned by many of his long-time colleagues.

Ben Foster in ‘The Program’ (Photo: TIFF)

The Program covers a lot of the same territory as Alex Gibney’s excellent (and deeply personal) 2013 documentary The Armstrong Lie, and one can’t help but wish that the parallels between Armstrong and Walsh — both deeply driven, obstacle-tackling men who didn’t back down from fights — had been the thrust of the film, rather than Armstrong’s well-chronicled arrogance and downfall (though watch Fostering fully inhabit Armstrong’s shamelessly cocky, borderline-sociopathic mindset is a treat). Still, in a movie where nearly everyone’s either taking drugs or doling them out, Walsh is the sole redeeming figure — and a reminder of what can happen when uncomfortable facts are placed in front of unimaginable power.

If Spotlight, Truth, and The Program may function as journalism-driven David vs. Goliath stories, but they’re bittersweet ones. All three of the films take part, for the most part, in the early- to mid-'00s — a time when newspapers were feeling the crunch of the Internet, but before the brutal layoffs and budget cuts that would hobble many great papers by the end of the decade and force others to close altogether. There are portents of such doom in the movies themselves: In Spotlight, an AOL billboard hangs near one of the Globe’s offices, a reminder of the web’s encroachment upon traditional print journalism. And at one point in Truth, a news-digger laments that all of their scoops are being lazily recycled by other outlets: “This is what our business has become,” he laments. “Reporting on reporting.”

Anyone who’s worked in journalism will recognize the complaint. What they might no longer recognize though, are the humming workplaces, deep-bench reporting staffs, and limitless resources that surround the characters in these films. To those who’ve watched the news industry come undone in the last few years, these films are more than just superhero stories — they’re nostalgia-stoking fantasies.