"They knew about it, and they let it happen"

Rating: 10/10 (22 January 2016)

There are times when God can be used by people who ought to know better to justify doing horrible things to others. The sex abuse scandal inside the Catholic church, which may very well have been going on for decades under the table, was one of those things; and it was exposed perhaps for the first time in one of the most heavily Catholic cities in the world, namely Boston. And it was reporters from the Boston Globe who, undeterred by threats, both implied and overt, conducted a year-long investigation into the pattern of pedophilia and the subsequent cover-up of it by religious and government figures in their city and made it public, causing a worldwide firestorm that in many ways damaged the Catholic church irreparably. That is the story told in director Tom McCarthy's brilliant film SPOTLIGHT.
SPOTLIGHT takes its name from that special investigations division of the Boston Globe that tended to uncover the less savory aspects of Boston's higher places of power; and it was that division uncovered the Boston sex abuse scandal. Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, and Mark Ruffalo portray the three real-life reporters who, bit by bit, gather all the facts about this story, one that Boston's Catholic archdiocese knew about for decades but had successfully buried for an equally long time. What they find out, in ways and through situations that have fairly modest but nevertheless noticeable parallels to the Watergate scandal depicted in ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, is that the pattern of priest abuse wasn't just limited to "a few bad apples", but which involved at least ninety of the Boston archdiocese's 1500 priests, and hundreds, if indeed not thousands, of young children dating as far back as the early 1960s. At the end, once their story hits the front pages of the Globe, which happened just a week or so into 2002, thousands of victims come forth with their own horror stories of encounters with Catholic priests having done decidedly unholy things to them as kids and getting away with it. What had been a local story, and more importantly one that had been kept under wraps forever, would now explode with financially and spiritually catastrophic results for the Catholic Church.
There are no "big scenes", in the strictest conventional Hollywood sense, here in SPOTLIGHT; indeed, much of the story unfolds so methodically. Moreover, none of the three principals outshines the others, which gives the film a decidedly ensemble feel with Keaton, Ruffalo, and McAdams. Liev Schreiber and John Slattery portray the real-life editors at the Globe who urged a press-forward until the paper got a story that was solid and would stand up to any kind of scrutiny. But besides being a great film about an important and still timely issue in American life, SPOTLIGHT is also something of a tragedy, in that these kids continued to bear the scars as adults; and in a faith where God is everything, and priests are looked upon almost as Jesus Himself, those scars and the betrayal that came from them are permanent and damaging.
The final victory for SPOTLIGHT is showing what a huge difference free and independent media in America, one beholden only to the news and the truth and not corporate and financial dictates, can make when it does its job. McCarthy and his cast should be roundly and loudly applauded for this film.