Revealing, touching, courageous

Rating: 8/10 (4 April 2016)

"Spotlight" is based on a real-life story surrounding the scandalous reveals of decade-long hushed-up affairs of sexual abuse in the Boston bishopric conducted by the reporters of the Boston Globe. The hot-potato-topic is an important addition to the already global critical discourse regarding pedophilia in the Catholic Church and a condemnation of its practice of merely removing child molesting priests to other parishes. The portraits of victims, already formed adults with families or single, gay or straight, but with the common characteristic of suffering badly under the suppressed trauma of the abuse, are both touching and revealing. It shows how deep you need to dig to find the source of suffering in a person, and how a fear of stigmatization can turn a person into a psychological mess, whereas the real culprits remain unpunished. In many communities, the Church plays a central role in terms of social life or can even be the only way out of peril for destitute people and children from troubled backgrounds. Which makes exposing the very people who help you as monsters in disguise even harder, bordering on unbearable. Coming from a country heavily influenced by religious institutions, I know how it feels to try to speak up against them and to feel the herds of their brainwashed flock coming at you.
Mark Ruffalo and Liev Shreiber did a great job here, and quite unexpectedly, the movie earned a best pic Oscar. An upside of the film could be that, similarly like in Burnt, we see a very accurate description of work dynamics in a newspaper HQ, with the difference of the former happening in a restaurant kitchen. If there's anything one could point at as a flaw, it's the fact that the film borders on documentary in terms of style and you can't help thinking it could be reduced to a 45-minute long doc on sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic church, with no losses in terms of its effect on the viewer.