Movie Review: "Spotlight"

"Spotlight": B+.  There are certain categories of movies to which I am almost involuntarily drawn.  For example, I find myself making an extra effort to watch Alfred Hitchcock mysteries, Gary Cooper westerns, Woody Allen comedies and Diane Lane anythings.  Films showing behind-the-scenes newspaper operations usually fascinate me as well, and are therefore also on the list.  Spotlight does that genre proud, following the four-person investigative arm of the Boston Globe as it relentlessly tracks down and exposes the perverted crimes of the Catholic Church's Boston archdiocese.

Veteran journalist Robby Robinson (Michael Keaton) is the Spotlight group's hands-on leader, but he equally shares the grunt work with the other team members, including Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) and Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams, sans makeup).  Spotlight had been working on a big police corruption story, but when new Globe editor-in-chief Marty Baron (Live Schreiber) arrives on the scene from Miami, he soon has the quartet shifting gears to probe some puzzling circumstances surrounding claims of priest pedophilia from decades ago.

 

The biggest hurdle standing in the way of the journalists' quest for the truth is not the lapse of time between the alleged acts and the present day.  Instead, it is the reluctance, followed by the resistance, of people directly or indirectly associated with the Catholic Church to cooperate with the Spotlight investigation.  Included among that group of people are some of the directors of Catholic Charities, who feel that any expose of church misconduct will undermine the nonprofit's philanthropic mission.  Potential witnesses, particularly older folks, refuse to provide information because of their misguided allegiance to the Church, which plays an important role in their lives.  Still other obfuscators are attorneys who hide behind attorney-client privilege or obscure privacy laws, and relatives of the suspected priests, hoping to let sleeping dogs lie.

 

Nevertheless, the Spotlight team is a band of intrepid investigators who, perhaps at the risk of their own career suicide if not their physical well-being, are not afraid to keep digging.  They realize they are taking on one of the most powerful institutions in the city, if not the entire country.  They pursue leads and cleverly connect seemingly unrelated evidentiary nuggets of information.  When they reach the point where they realize that the highest levels of the archdiocese are complicit in the crimes, the tension mounts.  Adding to the drama is the slowly unfolding realization that someone on the Globe staff itself may have buried leads to which concerned readers alerted them years before.

 

Two of the Spotlighters, Robinson and Rezendes, are native Bostonians.  People they've known all of their lives strongly urge them to quit their attempt to resurrect the cold cases.  Friendships and long-standing business relationships are threatened.  Some opine that it is the outsider, new editor-in-chief Baron, who is stirring the pot, not being appreciative of "all the Church has done for the city."

 

Keaton is convincing as group leader Robinson, a veteran newsman who doesn't let one dead end or uncooperative source dissuade him from carrying on.  He is dogged and feisty, and fits my stereotyped notion of a brash Bostonian.  Schreiber as top man Baron plays it straight, reminding me of a younger Harrison Ford.  He balances being the man with the veto power with simultaneously being the new kid on the block, listening carefully to the input of his subordinates before making decisions with historic consequences.  Most of the good lines go to Ruffalo's Rezendes, particularly when he wants the Spotlight team's discoveries to go to print immediately against the wishes of his boss, Robinson.  Stanley Tucci lends strong support as Mitchell Garabedian, a stressed out lawyer who represents many of the victims who, in their youth, were abused by priests and have psychologically suffered ever since.

 

People who live in the Twin Cities are quite familiar with this shameful black mark on the Church.  In fact it seems every year we learn of more diocese across the US where the transferring of pedophile priests from one parish to another was commonplace.  Were it not for the courageous investigations by the Boston Globe, followed by other media organizations, it's likely this sick practice would have been even more rampant.