All the President’s Men set a high bar for that long-standing Hollywood genre—the newsroom film depicting courageous reporters uncovering the dirt. Spotlight, this year’s Oscar winner for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay,is so squarely in that lineage that it could have been called All the Cardinal’s Men.
Although based in truth, Spotlight should not be mistaken for a documentary on the pedophile priest scandal uncovered by the Boston Globe in 2001. But by all accounts, Spotlight does a fair job of dramatizing what happened when the daily newspaper woke up to a pattern of abuse that had been concealed through a combination of shame and denial, buttressed by the pervasive power of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston and its influential head, Cardinal Bernard Law.
Directed and co-written by Tom McCarthy, Spotlight focuses on the Boston Globe’s elite investigative team, journalists given the luxury of months to find stories and a year or more to investigate them. The hothead among them, Michael Rezendes (brooding Mark Ruffalo), pursues the story with obsessive determination, but Walter Robinson (Michael Keaton), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) and Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James) are no slouches as they seek sources and troll the clip files and archives for clues, feeling blindly at first for the elephant in the room.
The screenplay insists repeatedly that sexual abuse went on for decades without being called out because no one wanted to question the Roman Catholic Church. The DA’s office was content to allow the archdiocese to cut private deals with victims forced to sign confidentiality agreements; the courts gladly sealed all legal documents; the cops weren’t talking; the church hierarchs were happy to shift predatory priests from parish to parish or put them on sick leave; the city’s leading citizens were pillars of the church; and the Globe itself was long wary to raise the alarm. It took a pair of outsiders to pull down the curtain of silence: the Globe’s new editor, an out-of-towner and a Jew, Marty Baron (played in gruff low key by Liev Scheiber); and the attorney representing victims, an Armenian, Mitchell Garabedian (a wily, impatient Stanley Tucci).
Some of those victims are incorporated into the plot and nervously tell the reporters their stories. They were young boys from lower-class families preyed upon by malefactors who posed as God’s representatives on Earth. Their sexual initiations were queasy and guilt-ridden; their innocence was abused and their faith broken. Garabedian and the Globe team established that priestly molestations weren’t rare but involved a shockingly large number of clergymen, a hierarchy determined to not only hide their crimes but excuse them and a city that looked the other way.
Spotlight feels a little long but the plot develops with enough detective story drama as clue lead to clue that the film never dragging. The story serves as a reminder that opinions sloshing around social networks and the Worldwide Web of snarky comments are no substitute for the hard work of investigative journalism, which requires time, diligence, talent and, yes, money.
