Some great films are tough to watch. Spotlight, the latest film from The Station Agent’s Tom McCarthy, is definitely one of those pictures, especially for Catholic audiences. You probably do not want to end up at this one with grandma while home for the holidays. Like last month’s Truth, Spotlight dramatizes the actual events surrounding a news organization’s attempts to check one of the nation’s… scratch that, the world’s most powerful institutions. Taking down a sitting U.S. president is one thing; taking down the Catholic Church is something else entirely. Over the course of 2001 and 2002, the four journalists that made up The Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” team shed light on one of the church’s darkest secrets: the decades-long cover up of child sexual abuse by hundreds of priests.
At the urging of their brand new editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), a Jew who did not like baseball, the Spotlight team, led by beloved editor and lifelong Bostonian Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton, absolutely killing it), risked everything to prove that Boston’s powerful Cardinal Bernard Law (Len Cariou) knew about the abuse and actively engaged in the cover-up by shuffling priests from parish to parish, allowing them access to even more unwitting victims, mostly children growing up in poverty. Dogged reporter Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) will not take “no” for an answer, as overtaxed attorney Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci) keeps stonewalling him. Meanwhile, Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) and Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James) seek out the identities of new victims and new predators. The entire case is fraught with tensions—physical, mental and spiritual. The deeper the reporters go, the more disgusted they become.
Oddly, though, the resulting cinematic investigation never leads to the heavy-handed wielding of power one expects from an institution as powerful as the church. No threatening calls in the night, rocks through the window or long arm of the law (or Law) occur. Still, the entire film is riveting. McCarthy and co-writer Josh Singer craft a superb script from which McCarthy builds a tremendous film that allows its powerful story to be the star. Despite an A-list cast, no one performer dominates a scene. Like the Spotlight reporters, this true ensemble knows what matters is that this story is told so it cannot happen again. In our increasingly Internet-reliant age, we need films like Spotlight to remind us how important our newsmen and women are for protecting the weak from the powerful.
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