Spotlight

by Tom McCarthy, Josh Singer

Anonymous Content

This is the year of the Message Movie. The Martian stressed the importance of science. Spectre took the concern of government surveillance to the ad absurdium conclusion (Christoph Waltz is watching you sleep!). Suffragette showed us the lengths some women felt forced to go to in order to get the rest of us the right to vote. The Walk reminded us what the World Trade Center had been.

What Spotlight does, besides talking about the abuses performed by Catholic priests and the way the Catholic infrastructure protected the priests at the expense of generations of kids, is remind us why independent newspapers, and reporters that have the time and freedom to do these investigations, are important.

Spotlight is the story of the reporters at the Boston Globe that broke the story of the Boston Archdiocese Sex Abuse Scandal in 2002, and the efforts they went to gather and confirm their information.  It stars Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo, Liev Schrieber, and Brian D’arcy James as the Globe crew, and includes Stanley Tucci as an attorney for the victims.

The Spotlight team at the Globe is the investigative reporting team, and in 2001, the Globe gets a new editor, Marty Baron (Schrieber) who suggests/directs the Spotlight team to look into the possibility that the priests who were being accused of molesting a large number of kids over decades were protected by Cardinal Bernard Law (at the time the Archbishop of Boston). The movie follows the leads the team takes, and sheer exhausting (sometimes literal) legwork of knocking on doors and looking for sources and confirmation.

I said in the Black Mass review that it can be difficult to make pacing work in a real-life based movie, because life doesn’t do that. And a movie where the action is based on combing through Catholic church directories and flipping through old news clippings can be a hard sell (in the Swedish Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, there’s a scene with super dramatic music of REARRANGING FURNITURE. It’s hilarious) but Spotlight and director Tom McCarthy avoid that problem. Sequences are cut tightly and don’t go on too long, and the real meat is during interviews: the compassion the reporters give while still focusing on their job, and trying to keep their disgust and horror at what they are hearing from the victims.

Another really great device McCarthy uses in the later half of the movie, as the team figures out how deep and fucked up this is, is the looming Catholic churches in the background of a LOT of shots. Talking to a victim with bell towers dominating the vertical. Steeples behind a courthouse where the Globe has filed a motion to make certain documents public. It’s effective.

It’s a rough movie, to be honest. In a few cases the victims describe in detail what was done to them (so be aware of that), and the mounting rage that builds and builds as it becomes clear exactly how far this went, and how many priests were involved – not just as perpetrators but as abettors in simply moving an offending priest to another parish – is palpable.

I watched this movie in a packed theater in Boston, the only movie theater in the area that was showing Spotlight. A lot of the crowd was older adults, and given the realities of living in Boston, it’s likely that at least 1/3 are Catholic, and they lived this. There are neighborhoods in Boston where some people want to know what parish you live in (and the suspicion you get when you don’t know, even when you’re not Catholic – oof). The church is still a huge institution here, and not being Catholic myself, I can’t even begin to imagine how people felt when this hit. I really cannot.

The reality is that the Globe had most of the pieces to put this together years ago, but also a LOT of people participated in the cover up. Some more willingly than others, and the pressure the church put on people to keep them quiet was enormous. But this is the importance of a media that is independent, and has the resources to devote to doing deep investigation on stories like this. There had been a few stories prior to 2002, but no follow up, no deep investigation, no gathering of stories from victims. This is a story that needed the Spotlight team and a little push from Baron to happen.

“We’re going to tell this story, and we’re going to tell it right.” They did. And so did the movie.

Spotlight is in theatres now, and you can find tickets at Fandango and Moviefone (US).