Boston journalists expose child-abuse in Catholic church

Rating: 9/10 (29 November 2015)

Spotlight opens on a closure and ends on an opening. Shining light on the shadows is the film's purpose and thrust. In the pre-title scene a child-molesting priest escapes exposure, arraignment and suppression by being transferred to another diocese. Cardinal Law protects his predators instead of the child victims. Church and police conspire to cover up the crime -- and repeat it. In the last scene the Boston Globe's Spotlight investigating team is flooded with calls from other victims, encouraged by the paper's exposure of the church.
This film serves several functions very well. At its most literal it provides a thorough analysis of the Catholic church's scandalous record of child abuse and protecting the abusers. We learn with the journalists what the priests did, about the helpless on whom they preyed, how the system created the predation and then perpetuated it, how the putative celibacy requirement encouraged it. The information this film delivers -- all in densely scripted dialogue and brisk, compelling scenes -- would fill a comprehensive study. A post-credit series of titles lists the global replays of this Boston story. What had been conventionally passed off as "a few bad apples" proves a.massive criminality and corruption.
The film's most bitter irony: when Cardinal Law resigns in shame for having transferred his abusive priests to other parishes, he is himself promoted to an important sinecure in the Vatican. Don't tell me Jesus didn't weep.
The film also celebrates another endangered institution, investigative journalism. Several scenes of the mechanics of journalism -- the meetings, the interviews, the library research, the filing system, the whirring presses, the delivery trucks -- evoke a tradition of journalism films. Democracy needs independent investigative journalism as a check on the powers that conspire for their own purposes. And that's the very first cut that surviving papers make to trim their expenses to fend off internet competition.
The film's broader target is that wider complicity of evil. As one character remarks, if it takes a village to raise a child it takes a village to abuse one. Of course many people knew what the priests were doing and turned a blind eye -- which is not the other cheek Jesus advised. Some of the best scenes show oily respectable citizens, civic leaders, churchgoing pillars of the community, tacitly colluding to hide the horror. It takes two outsiders — the Jewish editor and the Armenian lawyer — to discover the evil that the lapsed Catholic reporters track down. Indeed, even more appalling than the priests' transgressions are the good citizens who enable and protect it.
The film's ultimate target, beyond the church, is any institution that preserves itself by living with evil instead of fighting it. The villain here, in addition to the Catholic Church, is also the Globe that five years earlier missed the story, the police, college alumni and business community that let innocent children suffer rather than embarrass the institution.
This film is so densely scripted and shot that incidental phrases accrue potent pertinence. A sign on the printing press enjoins both the printers and the journalists, plus anyone who values a humane responsible society: "Stay clear."