Why We Love Movies Full of Paper Like ‘The Report’
What is it about those films that makes files, folders, and legal pads sort of sexy?
There is a particular scene in the movie Spotlight that is catnip for journalists, investigators, lawyers, and other research-happy nitpickers. It has to do with paperwork.
All four members of the Boston Globe’s investigative team probing sex abuse in the Catholic Church are bent over piles of church directories, tracing rows of listings with rulers, decoding terms, and circling names of potential pedophile priests with a pen. One by one, names are transferred from the directories to a spreadsheet, checked and double-checked until the team has a list of leads — and evidence of a cover-up. This builds up to Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James) realizing that one of the pedophile priests is lodged in a house near his own. He runs to the address, stands shocked, then tapes a photo of the house and its address to his refrigerator to warn his kids to keep away.
This sequence is the pinnacle of what I love about paperwork movies. Whenever I see one, I get a sudden urge to sharpen some pencils and draw up some charts and tables. Whether journalistic (Spotlight, The Post, The Insider, All the President’s Men) or legal (Michael Clayton, Erin Brockovich, The Firm), these are paper…
