The Catholic Church in Chile: Pablo Larraín's masterfully cringe-inducing THE CLUB opens

Here's a film that makes our current Catholic-scandal movie, Spotlight, look practically benign. THE CLUB, the new film from Chilean director/co-writer Pablo Larraín tackles priestly pedophilia in the kind of manner we have not seen previously: utterly raw, angry, take-no-prisoners. Unspooling in a small Chilean seacoast town in a home in which are housed several priests with, shall we say, bad reputations, along with a "nun" (maybe former nun) who takes care of them, from the outset the movie alerts us to the fact this little group has managed to do very well for itself. In fact, the film works quite nicely as a microcosm of The Catholic Church itself -- with all of its power and rewards, hypocrisy and denial offered up in full bloom.

The Club may be the most anti-Catholic movie I have ever seen, and yet its characters also seem very human and real (if pretty bizarre). What they do here, however, is shockingly awful, and the fact that it all works out for the "best" makes it seem even more so. Senor Larrain, shown at left, has given us a tale of Catholic guilt and non-retribution that stands with the best (or is it the worst?) of them. Although we come to understand to some extent the half dozen men, along with the woman who keeps them, as individuals, it is finally the group -- that Club of the title -- that we know best.

This is rather like the Church itself, don't you think? Where all is accomplished to keep the "group" -- the power -- together and going strong, no matter the "sacrifices" that must be made along the way. Here, as with all organized religion, the end justifies the means. Interlopers of any kind (there are three major ones in this movie) must be destroyed or co-opted. Maybe both simultaneously.

How all this is demonstrated by Larraín and his co-writers (Guillermo Calderón and Daniel Villalobos) involves everything from small-minded townspeople to greyhound racing, black-market babies to sexual child abuse (performed, of course, in the name of Jesus), military torture to simple blackmail. And all this is woven into the fabric of life experienced by our little beachfront club members.

The movie opens with a bout of that dog racing and then the introduction of a new "priest" into the current group, followed almost immediately by the introduction of the classic "victim" figure, a fellow named Sandokan (a fine Roberto Farías, above), who makes this figure one of the strongest and most original yet seen in the many films about priest pedophilia so far served up.

Then we have another newcomer to the group: an investigator sent from the Vatican to assess the group and decide what to do with them, since pushing defrocked priests off into far-away places and then forgetting about them has now come back to haunt the Church. How our investigator plies his trade and how he, too, is finally used and co-opted proves one of the films darkly comic highlights.

Watching these people play off of and bounce around each other makes for some of the more unsettling, unnerving scenes experienced in cinema over the past few years. Larraín is increasingly masterful at the kind of indirection that shows us how we are all perpetrators and victims. Does this let us off the hook? Hardly. Instead the filmmaker does here for the The Catholic Church what he has done earlier in his films regarding the Pinochet regime in Chile.

The performances are all as bizarre as the subject matter would indicate, and they work individually and together to make the movie as creepily memorable as it ought to be. Organized evil never dies. Particularly when it comes from organized religion.

The Club, from Music Box Films and running a mere 97 minutes, opens this Friday in New York City (at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Landmark Sunshine Cinema), and on Friday, February 12 in Los Angeles (at Landmark's NuArt) and in Southern Florida at the O Cinema Miami Beach, the Tower Theater Miami and the Silverspot in Naples, and then on February 19 here in Boca Raton at the Living Room Theaters. Click here -- and then click on THEATERS -- to see all currently scheduled playdates across the country.

LAMB: Ross Partridge adapts, directs and stars in this doozy about trust and betrayal

Tragedy hangs over the new movie, LAMB, like a beautifully wafting shroud. One of its two stars, Ross Partridge, directed the film, as well as adapted it (from the novel by Bonnie Nadzam), and he has come up with something rather extraordinary: a kind of character study about characters who've gone missing -- in at least a couple of senses of that word. Mr. Partridge, shown on poster, right, and below, plays a fellow who appears to have no character. He's a kind of semi-benign sociopath who lies constantly: to his wife, boss, mistress and then, maybe to the other important character in the film, a young girl he meets and gloms onto, who, in the course of the movie, goes missing herself.

Or is this guy, called both David and Gary as the movie wends its ways along, really something else?  Maybe just a poor, addled, lonely, middle-aged man looking for some genuine connection. And what, finally, has he wrought -- does he wreak -- by movie's end upon that young girl, called both Tommie and Emily?  Has he helped or harmed her? The mystery, as well as much of the ferocity, of Lamb is that you will find potent arguments on both sides of these questions. Whatever your answer, you'll be forced to consider this unusual situation from a new perspective.

While Mr. Partridge excels in all three roles -- as adaptor, director and actor -- the real find is the young actress, Oona Laurence (above), who plays Tommie/Emily. Ms Laurence possesses a level of maturity and focus that even most adult actors never achieve. (She reminds us, in this regard, of the younger Saoirse Ronan.) The actress has the ability to look and act both her own age and that of a much older, wiser person -- without ever losing her grasp on the reality of the situation at hand. Her performance here also avoids, thank god, any hint of the "cute."

How these two characters meet and bond is of great help to the film's reality quotient. What happens then, while coming up against our current understanding of pedophilia and child abuse. turns the film into a kind of open-ended morality play, with plenty of ammunition provided for either side of the argument.

Lamb is mostly a two-hander, with the only other major role essayed by the fine Jess Weixler, who plays the mistress of David/Gary and whose character is intelligent enough to finally provide us a small "fix" on this guy's modus operandi. At one point she tells him, "You can't go around making the whole world angry, just so you'll know where you stand."

From its initial not-so-cute meet, the movie morphs into a kind of road trip and from there into an increasingly fraught situation in which love and need jockey for position with fear and pain. Through it all, Ms Laurence has us in thrall, while Mr. Partridge keeps us guessing -- and hoping.

Similar in certain ways to another odd-and-finite-relationship movie -- last year's Like Sunday Like Rain -- this pairing seems as wrong and unhelpful as the earlier film's twosome was beneficial and valuable. But that's my "take" on things. Partridge's film is definitely worth seeing, arguing over, and finally coming to your own conclusion about what our guy has done to or for our girl.

Distributed by The Orchard and running a just-about-perfect length at 97 minutes, Lamb opens this Friday, January 8, in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Music Hall 3 and in New York City at the Cinema Village.

Tom McCarthy's SPOTLIGHT is as good as you've heard. Which is saying a whole lot.

Earlier this year New York magazine ran an article in which it noted that writer/director Tom McCarthy had managed to have both one of the year's best reviewed movies (SPOTLIGHT) and one of its worst-reviewed (The Cobbler*). That's some kind of weird record, to say the least. Having finally caught up with Spotlight this week, TrustMovies can vouch for how fine a film it is: one of the very few I've seen that delves into a particular workplace -- investigative reporting for a big-city daily newspaper (in this case The Boston Globe) -- and, according all the notices I've so far seen, together with what I myself know about investigative reporting, shows this workplace in a truthful and realistic manner.

The story it tells, based pretty closely on the facts, is of the pedophile-priests scandal that rocked the Boston area and The Catholic Church a decade or more ago, and that ought to have rocked both two decades earlier, when reports of the abuse were also coming in. Mr McCarthy, shown at left, has long been a wonderful filmmaker, talented, modest and reliably low-key. From The Station Agent, through The Visitor and Win Win, his talent has resulted in movies in which "reach" and "grasp" become one and the same. (The fellow is also a fine actor, with 38 acting credits to his name but only seven writing and five directing credits, according to the IMDB.)

Spotlight is the first time McCarthy has worked on anywhere this large a scale. Yet, along with his co-screenwriter, Josh Singer, he's been able to capture both the big picture (the network of power that had kept the scandal in tow for so long) and the small one (the step-by-step investigation procedures that finally result in the whole story). As per usual, the filmmaker manages this in such a modest, unshowy fashion that it might seem easy to overlook his excellent work come awards time.
I hope not.

One hallmark of McCarthy's films is their fine ensemble acting. Not only is Spotlight no exception, it features as good an ensemble performance as the filmmaker has managed so far. My spouse pointed out immediately after viewing the film that it seemed like these actors were real people rather than performers or characters. There is indeed a documentary feel which contributes mightily to the unusual sense of reality the film achieves.

"Spotlight" is the name of the small group of reporters who work on special projects for the Globe, often taking a very long time to bring their stories to fruition. Leading the group is Robbie (Michael Keaton, shown above, left, and three photos above, here as low-key and under-the-radar as he was over-the-top in last year's overblown Birdman). Robbie has a bevy of good reporters under his wing, including Matt (Brian d'Arcy James, at left, two photos above), Sacha (Rachel McAdams (above, right) and Mike (Mark Ruffalo, below, right, with Stanley Tucci, who plays the lawyer for many of the victims).

All of these characters (shown below) report to Ben Bradlee, Jr. (John Slattery, seen below, right), who in turn reports to the paper's new editor-in-chief (played by an extremely bright but buttoned-down Liev Schreiber, shown at bottom, second from left).

So cleverly and intelligently is laid out the investigation -- alternating between victims (with only an occasional look at a predator) and reporters, between those in the power structure, whether it be the Church or its minions who run the city and culture, who want to keep the story underwraps -- that the film allows us to fully understand what is going on without ever being banged atop the head with "meaning" or heavy-handed ironies. (The movie also never seems too slick; rather, it appears focused and pro-active -- adjectives that I'll bet describe the moviemaker, too.)

The film moves fast, too. Timing out at just over two hours, there's not a tired or treacly moment to be seen. Distributed by Open Road -- a company that, after releasing a number of very good but not all that big-at-the-boxoffice movies (from Hit and Run to End of Watch) has finally broken into the big-time with this excellent film -- Spotlight is playing across the country now. Click here to find the theater near you.

*After viewing Spotlight and taking into consideration 

McCarthy's entire oeuvre, we're planning to stream 

The Cobbler off Netflix tonight -- to see if maybe 

that critical drubbing was undeserved. 

We'll weigh in with our opinion a little later....

THE HUNT: Thomas Vinterberg's -- and one of the year's -- best & most unsettling films

Pedophilia is such a hot-button topic that few narrative films tend to go there. Documentaries do, particularly when the abuser is connected with The Catholic Church, an organization more than worthy of ridicule and disdain. The subject is most often used as the cheap hook for sex-and-violence television and/or cable fare. This is one reason, of many, that the new Danish film THE HUNT (Jagten) is so worthy of your time and attention.

In it, a little girl (an exactly-right performance from Annika Wedderkopp, above, right)-- exposed to a provocative sexual visual by one of her older brother's adolescent friends around the same time as she experiences a rebuff from a much-beloved teacher and friend -- puts two and two together and gets 22. She doesn't lie, exactly, but she deliberately connects things that were heretofore unconnected, and when all hell breaks loose from her original comment, she is practically forced by almost all the adults around her to stick by her "story" and in fact elaborate on it.

How this plays out in The Hunt may bring to the minds of many of us Americans the infamous McMartin case from the 1980s -- a near model of what not to do in investigating supposed sexual abuse -- not to mention the more recent documentary Capturing the Friedmans that investigates similar territory. The former case was shown to be concocted out of the loony-tune minds of sex-hysterics; the latter unfortunately, despite strong evidence of poorly-handled investigation by the prosecution, continues to mine its injustices.

The film begins with what looks like the Danish version of a Polar Bear Club late-fall swim (two photos above), and then we hop from the water to home, school and all around town, noting the charm and easy camaraderie of this seemingly tight little community -- which proves just as tight in its hatred for and closing out of the would-be pedophile, once the rumor begins to spread. Nothing in this story is particularly new, I grant you, but its telling could hardly be better in terms of pulling us into the fast-crumbling life of its protagonist, played by the brilliantly empathic and versatile actor Mads Mikkelsen (above).

We see example after example of former friends and associates turn away from this innocent man, and as awful as this is to witness, it is also quite believable, for as one of the accusers states, "Children don't lie." Of course they do, but this is another of mankind's fondest hypocrisies, and it's one that is especially difficult to sink. I am trying to think of another film that places us this thoroughly under the skin of an accused innocent, but nothing comes to mind.

You will hate the rotten townspeople on view, even as you cannot help but wonder if you would be doing the same thing under similar circumstances. You'll feel disgust at the way all this is handled -- by the school, the authorities, the parents. And yet how often, you'll wonder, does something very nearly the same happen?

As directed and co-written (with Tobias Lindholm) by Thomas Vinterberg (shown at left, of Submarino and The Celebration), the movie looks smashing, as well. The photography (by Charlotte Bruus Christensen) is alternately gorgeous and colorful, dark and drained, and the writing is so very much better than that of A Hijacking (another recent Lindholm film). Directorially, the movie is the most polished of Vinterberg's career.

The ability to make viewers' blood boil -- and yet allow them to understand precisely how and why this must occur -- is no simple task, and Vinterberg deserves high praise for achieving this so well. He's clearly on the side of our hero but he also understands the townspeople's fear and anger, and even better, he lets us into the mind and feelings of the young girl in question.

Part thriller, part character study, part moral-quandary movie, The Hunt works on every level. And its unsettling ending seems to me just right in a number of ways. Off-balance is how we live now.

The movie, from Magnolia Pictures and running a fast-paced 111 minutes, opens today, Friday, July 12, in New York (at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema and the Angelika Film Center) and in Los Angeles (at Laemmle's Royal and Playhouse 7). In the weeks (and months) to come, the film will open all around the country. To see all currently scheduled playdates, click here.

Rumur's back -- with a 30-year missing-child project, WHO TOOK JOHNNY?

RUMUR, the consortium of filmmakers -- Michael Galinksy, Suki Hawley and David Beilinson -- who brought you one of the best documentaries seen in this new millennium, BATTLE FOR BROOKLYN, are back with a new project. Its first draft, so to speak, was shown a few weeks back on MSNBC: a documentary about a 12-year-old boy named Johnny Gosch, who disappeared while delivering newspapers in West Des Moines, Iowa, on the morning of September 5, 1982. His face -- along with that of another missing child from the same geographic area -- was one of, maybe the first to appear on a milk carton.

Stories like this -- for parents, grandparents, entire extended families -- are among the most difficult to view. They call up primal fears about the loss of one's child -- and worse: the hell of not knowing, and sometimes never learning, what happened or if your child remains alive. These filmmakers have previously shown, via their "Battle" and their amazing George W. Bush-book documentary Horns and Halos, that they are capable of taking a bizarre true story of a single human being fighting like hell against the stream of would-be "truth" and "facts" and, if not winning the battle, at least proving that caring and perseverance count for a lot, demand our respect -- and above all some imitation.

In their latest venture, it's the mother of the missing boy, Noreen Gosch (shown above and below, at the time of her son's disappearance), who, when local police do next-to-nothing to find the boy, takes it upon herself to work tirelessly (for 30 years now) to uncover the facts in this harrowing case. [Here's a scene that did not make the TV version, showing Noreen visiting a present-day (2012) couple whose little girl had recently been kidnapped; another that you can watch from the  film offers a kind of re-creation of the abduction of Johnny.]

Rumur's film-making team ferrets out the history here, with some terrific archival footage -- along with some current footage, interviews, and a wonderful weaving together of all the information. The result is a 44-minute short film about this case (this was what was aired on MSNBC) that is absolutely riveting. It's full of event and surprise, and it will leave you, I believe, profoundly moved by what these 30 years have done to everyone involved.

You can watch all 44 minutes of the TV version now, free-of-charge, on Vimeo. But -- counteracting what I posted earlier, due to legal ramifications -- you will have to "request" this viewing. Either let me know at my email address, jamesvanmaanen@gmail.com, or you can contact the filmmakers directly at m_galinsky@yahoo.com.

This short version of the story will be fleshed out into a full-length film next year, just as soon as its current Kickstarter campaign is finished. There are only two more days to go on this campaign, which is nearing fruition. So, please, if you have the time (and just a little moolah/dough/dinero), watch this movie now and then help the movie-makers complete their task by donating a little something to the campaign.

Johnny's and Noreen's is a story that needs to be told for so many reasons, some of them quite surprising and all of them damned good. Pedophilia/sex-trafficking is but one of the doorways you enter here. This is a tale, like others that Rumur has told, that takes what we think we know about a subject or a situation and then, rather than either verifying this or destroying it, simply expands it into something rich and strange and so much more than most of us could (or might want to -- but it's healthier if we do) imagine.

Alex Gibney's MEA MAXIMA CULPA: SILENCE IN THE HOUSE OF GOD

In his new documentary, Alex Gibney, the prolific director of some 27 documentaries and the man who took on ENRON, torture in Iraq, Freakonomics, Jack Abramoff, Eliot Spitzer and Wall Street now turns his attention to The Catholic Church. The results, as shown via MEA MAXIMA CULPA: SILENCE IN THE HOUSE OF GOD, are properly staggering. One of the many things that distinguishes Mr. Gibney's work is that the filmmaker (shown below) goes after the big boys rather than the ever-expendable foot soldiers doing the bidding of the man (or men) upstairs. His latest documentary is no exception. There have been several other excellent, earlier, pedophile exposés (among them films by Amy Berg and Kirby Dick) but I believe this latest casts the widest net and probes deepest.

Rather than simply concentrating on a single priest -- the Reverend and pedophile Lawrence Murphy, who, while he was "serving" at St. John's School for the Deaf in Milwaukee, abused more than 200 children over a 24-year period -- Gibney only begins here. By the time his film ends, he'll have gone upwards in the hierarchy of The Catholic Church in Wisconsin, the USA, and finally Rome, coming to rest upon the Vatican's current Pope Benedict XVI, proving to my mind (and I suspect most who see this film) that the current Pope knew -- for years! -- of Father Murphy's transgressions and those of many other pedophile priests and determined to keep them secret, thus protecting those priests, their supperiors and of course the Church itself. Papal infallibility? My ass.

Don't worry. The filmmaker never gets as grossly intemperate as I just did. Instead, he lays out his tale quietly and methodically but, since the details are so shocking and unpleasant, there is no chance to anyone growing bored with the film -- which concentrates on several of Murphy's young victims, both then and now, some 40 years later. (That's the Reverend and one of his victims, shown above.) Gibney details everything from how and when the abuses took place to the ways in which the children tried to get word out about what was happening. Murphy smartly chose those kids who parents did not "sign" and so could not be easily informed by their children of what was going on. When the children are finally able to reach the eyes and heart of a substitute priest while Murphy is away, this man tries to alert the authorities, but -- surprise! -- nothing happens.

As young men, the group creates flyers to distribute throughout the community (like the one shown at right). Still there is no change to the status quo. In the Vatican, as the Mafia, the rule of Omertà (silence) is all-powerful. So Gibney digs. Into records, and then interviews with priests, higher-ups, the kids and journalists, he probes. More garbage is unearthed. Along the way Gibney stages his reenactments quietly, using shadow and subtlety, so that we get the sense of what happened without the obvious and mostly unnecessary actors-playing-parts scenes that ruined the recent documentary, Orchestra of Exiles.

The movie does travel back and forth to different time frames frequently, and I wonder if some of the information presented could have been organized differently so that it flowed a bit more easily. I would imagine that this is the most difficult part of putting together a documentary: organizing the reams of information into an intelligible, organic whole that leads us inexorably toward our conclusion. Gibney, despite an occasional gaudy visual (see photo below) gets it mostly right, and by his movie's end, we understand that The Catholic Church -- in these, as I would imagine all cases in which the deeds of that church collide with the best interests of its parishioners -- will always win out. Even and especially when those parishioners are children, the most vulnerable of them all.

Mea Maxima Culpa..., a presentation of HBO Documentary Films and running 107 minutes, opened yesterday, Friday, November 16, in New York at Film Forum and will play a two-week run. Mr Gibney will appear in person tonight, Saturday, at the 7:50 screening. Note: the daily 5:40 screening offers English subtitles for the hearing impaired.