history

I’ve said before how much I enjoy films about institutional cover-ups and the legal and media process of uncovering them. Hadn’t got round to this one until now. My librarian tendencies will show when I say that the best parts are the archive-digging ones: church directories, the euphemisms in the personnel listings (sick leave, unassigned), four reporters slowly working out just how many names that adds up to. Ruffalo gives Rezendes the right kind of intensity. McAdams does things with greater calm but no less well. Liev Schreiber plays Marty Baron at roughly half the volume of anyone else in the room, and makes me wonder why we don’t see much more of him in big-screen roles.

That scandal that Field of Dreams turned into myth, this time told straight. Where the other film lets Shoeless Joe walk out of the corn to be forgiven, this one keeps things factual: how the 1919 White Sox actually threw the World Series, and how they were ruined for it.

Another film I’m mostly watching for John Cusack. Here he plays Buck Weaver, the one who knew the plan, stayed quiet and took nothing. And who still paid the same price as the men who sold out. Not the same as his other characters’ moral slides: here a decent man is ruined for being in the same room. You want him to escape it all and you know he won’t.

Incidentally Strathairn and Sweeney are both good here. Actors you wish the industry had handed bigger careers.

Great short. Part of my mission to watch everything Vic Michaelis is in.