Spotlight (5/5 Stars)

“Spotlight” is not so great as it is important. This reviewer attends the school that any subject matter no matter how unimportant has the potential to be elevated to perfection by a great artist. But there are some subject matters that are so important already any perceived effort at elevation may seem unduly indulgent or distracting. When Roger Ebert reviewed Steven Spielberg's “Schindler’s List,” he made a point to praise the absence of any of Spielbergian usual directorial flourishes. The movie was about the Holocaust. It would have been disrespectful to do anything fancy with the camera. Such is the same category “Spotlight” finds itself in. It is a movie about the group of reporters at the Boston Globe who broke the Catholic Church paedophilia scandal in 2002. Again the best praise I can give to the director/writer Thomas McCarthy is that he does not seem to be there at all. The direction is as straightforward as possible and nothing is heightened with unneeded suspense or dumbed down when a complicated explanation of court motions or journalistic procedures is needed. 

There are actually two stories in this movie and they complement each other. The Boston Globe in the late nineties was facing like every other local newspaper in America a crisis of falling readership and vanishing advertising revenue due to free digital content. There are layoffs and then there are more layoffs. The Globe is bought by the New York Times and they import a new head editor named Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber). The man is a Jew from Florida. That is to say he is not Irish Catholic from Boston like everyone else at the newspaper. It is his idea to look closer at a couple of stories the Globe has already done about a priest named Gagin accused of child abuse. A lawyer named Mitchell Garabedian said Cardinal Law of the Boston Archdiocese knew about Gagin for a long time and did not defrock him or turn him into the authorities. The court documents that may prove this accusation are sealed and Marty Baron wants to sue the church to unseal those documents.

There is not some great hurry to get onto this story by the people at the Globe. Nobody is really against it as much as it seems like they just don’t want to do it or even think about it. Only Mike Rezendes, the hungry young reporter played by Mark Ruffalo, is eager for the assignment. He is on screen about a minute before he already becomes everybody’s favorite character. Anyway the newspaper’s investigative team, Spotlight, takes on the task of delving a little bit deeper. The first task is to find the lawyer played by Stanley Tucci. Now this guy is a character and it matters too. His insight in one scene is enlightening to say the least.

He is talking to Mike and asks about the new editor. It is noteworthy that it is a Jew from out of town, he says, I should know I’m Armenian. (Mike is Catholic, but Portugese and lapsed). “It takes an outsider to put a light on this sort of thing. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse a child.” In other words, everybody is guilty in some respect.

What is perhaps the most astonishing thing for the reporters is how little needs to be done before the story becomes bigger and bigger and bigger. And whenever they push a little harder and perhaps put a little more pressure on their targets, they get accusatory blowback about themselves. At one point the editor of Spotlight Walter 'Robby' Robinson (played by Michael Keaton) confronts a lawyer who has settled many cases with the church and demands a list of names. He provides one of the best “tough journalist” lines in the movie. “We got two stories here. One is about degenerate clergy. The other is about a bunch of lawyers turning child abuse into a cottage industry. Which one do you want us to write because we're writing one of them?” The lawyer is taken completely aback before he retorts with some emotion that all Robby has to do is check back issues of the Boston Globe. He sent them a list of twenty names five years ago. When Woodward and Bernstein were immortalized in “All the President’s Men” it made those two journalists look like super sleuths. This story is as much about a failure of journalism as much as it is a triumph of it. But even looking at it both ways, it becomes clear why local newspapers are very important. If the Boston Globe did not finally report this story, nobody would have. The national networks on TV certainly would not have come anywhere near this story. It is a very bad thing that investigative teams within local newspapers like Spotlight are becoming an extinct species.

For those interested in the subject matter (or all Catholics), this movie would make a great double feature with the documentary, “Deliver Us From Evil,’ which is about the church sheltering predator priests in California. (There is also a really good double feature in the journalism side. There I would recommend The Wire: Season 5). The complicity of the church is absolutely astounding and although there have been apologies and court settlements, very little has actually been done about the underlying policy that generates such an enormous amount of abuse. After all, what the Boston Globe took pains to explain is that this is not a few bad apples, it is a psychological phenomenon that springs from the celibacy requirement of priests and affects about 6% of the priest population. When the reporters learn that, they do the math. They were looking at 13 priests. Boston has 1500 priests. 6% of that population is 90 priests. Disturbingly they actually find 87 priests in Boston and confirm the number with an inside source from the church. It is a number that is absolutely stunning and there is a haze of silent desperation that hangs over the end of the movie. Sure it is good that the Globe finally uncovered the story, but if there were 87 predator priests in Boston, how did they miss it for so many years? The answer to that may lie in a conversation between the archbishop and the new editor. The archbishop states that it is in Boston’s good for its institutions to work together. Marty Baron disagrees. “Actually I feel for a paper to fulfill its function, it should stand alone.” Society needs its outsiders.

Spotlight should be any easy nomination for Best Picture and Best Writing (Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy). I would also like at least one actor to be nominated from the ensemble as a supporting actor. The movie has great performances by Stanley Tucci, Mark Ruffalo, and Michael Keaton. Take your pick.