A Triumph of Investigative Journalism

Rating: 8/10 (21 January 2016)

In today's click-bait internet media culture it's easy to forget that behind every large credible story there is a reporter who did the legwork to find sources, do the research and occasionally act with editorial restraint. In Spotlight's case it was a group of dedicated reporters that blew the lid off of the Boston Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal that rocked an entire institution to its core. Michael Rezendes (Ruffalo), Walter Robinson (Keaton), Sacha Pfeiffer (McAdams) and Matt Carol (d'Arcy) were those reporters and Spotlight is their story to bring the scandal to press.
The story is not altogether a very glamorous one. The offices of the Spotlight team (the oldest investigative journalism team in the country) resembles the opaque basement bullpen of a third rate claims adjustment outfit. There are mountains of paper scattered atop shrinking desks anchored by outdated computers. All the reporters who call this office home are locals, well versed in Red Sox trivia, where to get the best pizza, and have had experiences growing up with the Church's influence. So when new Head Editor, and admitted outsider Marty Baron (Schreiber) asks Spotlight to investigate allegations of sexual abuse in the church, you can imagine their apprehension. That apprehension is overstated at first by Assistant Managing Editor Ben Bradlee Jr. (Slattery), then the victims start coming in and the Church starts to take notice.
Many movies about large conspiracies unravel in a hyperbolic web of conceits. This is immediately followed by the perfunctory veiled threat on the part of the conspirators. Yet here, the plot is deliberate and very interested in the small salient details that define newspaper journalism at its best. "This strikes me as an essential story for a local paper," says the pensive Baron as he finally convinces Robinson to take the story and run with it. It is at that moment we as the audience feel the necessity of their actions and their ink; they write the story because locals are in the best position to do so and if they don't no one else will.
There are also no veiled threats on the part of the church yet we still feel their looming influence in nearly every scene. Every time one of the Globes reporters is gumshoeing on the streets we always see a steeple somewhere in the background. When Baron meets the infamous Cardinal Law (Cariou) in his estate office you feel the man's affluence as everything is tinged with an auburn hue and seemingly dipped in gold. The offices of the Globe is filled with lapsed Catholics yet everywhere in their personal lives there are hints of the Church's influence on their upbringing. Pfeiffer makes a habit of going to Church on Sunday with her mother, Rezendes always assumed he could go back to the fold and be accepted with open arms, Robinson himself was the product of a Catholic School education, a fact that is thrown in his face when the story's deadline looms. All have a crisis of faith not just in Catholicism but faith in humanity. When Carol realizes one the psychology centers for wayward priests resides in his neighborhood he walks down the street and stares down the house with suspicion and contempt.
Then there are the victims. In one pivotal scene Bradlee, is shocked to find there are thirteen innocents that were abused by priests, all of which are still in circulation. It is only later that we even begin to understand the full extent of the damage done lest to say it is far more than thirteen in Boston alone. Besieged Lawyer Mitchell Garabedian (Tucci) who specializes in these kinds of unfortunate cases said it best when asked how something like this was allowed to go on for so long. "If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse them. That's the truth of it."
Probably the biggest victim in this movie is journalism itself. In a handful of not-so-subtle scenes, director Tom McCarthy hints that the kind of journalism Spotlight does is no longer a fundamental part of journalism today. The Boston Church scandal was the first national news story to break and be covered widely after 9/11 and in the film it feels like a final triumph before investigative reporting packs up and slinks away; replaced by sensationalism and political vitriol. There are still outfits like Spotlight who work silently and make big waves when the time comes yet as paper media dies a slow death, these teams are asked to do twice as much with three times less. We have more means of communication than we ever had in history, yet the sources for the kind of system changing, disruptive information we crave or lacking that need, have become sparse. Here's to hoping change is made soon.