Boston creep party

Rating: 8/10 (7 February 2016)

This excellent film dramatises the Boston Globe newspaper's exposure in 2001 of the years old child abuse practices of hundreds of Roman Catholic priests in and around the city and the attendant cover-up by the powers that be in the church from the Cardinal on down. More than that, it points the finger at the shoulder-shrugging complicity of other areas of the establishment like the law courts, police and the press, including the paper's own earlier self, burying previous isolated reports on the subject deep in the paper without thought of following up the bigger story. Indeed it takes the arrival of a new editor at the paper to revive the story which he does by setting loose its specialist four-strong investigative team known as Spotlight on the case, where they soon find substance to the rumours and fight to bring it to light.
The subject matter is of course bound to invite viewer sympathy but the film doesn't simply prey on that. Reminiscent at times of the likes of "All The President's Men" and classic TV series like "Lou Grant", it works by taking us inside the workings of the paper and avoiding gratuitous dramatic showdowns with either individual priests or even the misguided Cardinal, the climax to the sordid affair is simply the story finally hitting the streets on the paper's front page. There's no big self- congratulatory triumphant scene at the end, merely a shockingly long list of other instances the world over of the church covering over the traces of paedophile priests abusing their positions of trust.
The acting is high quality, with the revitalised Michael Keaton as the sage leader of the team, keen to bring down not just the Cardinal but the whole cover-up system which protected the offending priests by signing them out of commission with anodyne phrases like "on sick leave" for example. He's driven by his own incidental complicity in not digging deeper into the story when it first aired years before but it's he who eventually drives out the vital corroboration which enables it to finally get out there. Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams are also very good as the Rossi and Billie of the team, teasing the story out of the worn-out and cowed solicitor who first tried to put forward the victims' stories, again well played by Stanley Tucci and generally putting in the hard yards behind the story to get it into print.
There's probably another story in there about the Vatican's complicity in the hushing up process, but the film is probably right to localise the action and let the viewer contemplate this and other pertinent questions (like where are the offending priests now, for one) arising from this worthy and well made picture.