Stunning film about a vile case of abuse and its cover-up

Rating: Null/10 (31 January 2016)

This film tells the astonishing story of the "Boston Globe"'s Pulitzer Prize-winning Spotlight team of investigative journalists who uncovered the Catholic Church's systematic cover-up of widespread child abuse by more than 70 local priests. It took five months of hard investigation before, in January 2002, the newspaper printed its first article.
"Spotlight" is a wonderful piece of ensemble acting with Michael Keaton as the team's head Walter 'Robby' Robinson, Rachel McAdams and Mark Ruffalo as the reporters Sacha Pfeiffer and Michael Rezendes, Brian d'Archy James as the researcher Matt Carroll, Liev Screiber and John Slattery as the editors Marty Baron and Ben Bradley Jr, and Stanley Tucci as the victims' attorney Mitchell Garabedian. The fact that Baron was Jewish and Garabedian Armenian suggests that often revelation of scandal requires the intervention of an outsider to the system
In this quietly stunning film, we see how good investigative reporting requires passionate commitment and fierce independence plus forensic attention to detail and a lot of shoe-leather and door-knocking. There are no action sequences and, except for one scene, no grandstanding in a movie in which the story is everything and really two stories in one: the actual abuse and then the cover-up. There will naturally be comparison with "All The President's Men", another true-life account of brilliant investigation by committed reporters, but that film was 40 years ago and one could also relate "Spotlight" to "The Big Short", released about the same time, since both are appalling examples of the abuse of power and the difficulty in holding power to account.
For six years, I was Chair of the Internet Watch Foundation in Britain which combats the availability of child abuse material online. so I know that the viewing of such images and the perpetration of such acts cuts across all classes and occupations. But there is something especially vile about child abuse by religious figures and, in the case of the Catholic Church, a vital factor is the mandation of celibacy by its clergy. I went to Catholic schools and an epiphanic moment for me was when we were taught that celibacy was a superior moral state to marriage.
At the end of "Spotlight", there is a list of the many other cities besides Boston - in both the USA and around the world - where there have been other cases of such child abuse by Catholic priests. One of them was my home town.