Six percent. Six. Know what that is? The likelihood that your Catholic priest is a sexual predator … of children. 6%. That’s one in seventeen. Add ‘em up. Do you/did you go to a Catholic school? Were there at least seventeen priests associated with it? That’s scary stuff. Really, really scary. Do I believe that stat? I have no reason not to after watching Spotlight, the biography of the Boston Globe reporters who uncovered the scandal.
Spotlight is not the feel good Friday night family film you’re looking for. I’ve gotten myself into a pickle here; there’s no comedy that’s going to make the subject material shine. No wink and a smile, no amount of yuks are going to make priest pederasty palatable, so I’m just gonna stick to the screenplay, for which I hope Tom McCarthy takes a nomination; I also hope that it wasn’t autobiographical in any way.
I feel like we’ve talked about clerical sexual abuse for so long that we forget it actually wasn’t more than two decades ago in which the idea of this kind of crime was unthinkable (to those who were not victims, at least). The first step in taking something for granted, however, is making it public. In the late 20th Century, Spotlight was a small core group of special investigative reporters within the Boston Globe. Not unlike the Supreme Court, they chose their own cases and worked by their own timetable. Some investigation took more than a year to unravel. Can you imagine that? A newspaper with the resources to devote to a full year of nothing from an entire subsection? This is what newspaper reporting was like in between Woodward/Bernstein and the Internet. New Globe section chief Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) arrives from Miami and decides it’s time Spotlight actually started taking some direction. He mentions an unresolved case, a single case, of priest abuse in the 70s – he questions aloud whether Bernard Law, the Archbishop of Boston, knew and covered it up – that’s a scandal; this is what investigative reporters used to do, uncover scandals.
Hence, under the direction of Walter Robinson (Michael Keaton), the team of Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) and Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James, the guy in the group who is not Keaton, Ruffalo or McAdams), the Spotlight team takes on the Catholic Church in Boston. Lemme tell ya, that isn’t quite like taking on Muslim pilgrims in Mecca, Stalin in the Red Square or Orcs in Mordor, but it isn’t a full standard deviation removed. Boston is real Irish and real Catholic, dig?
Spotlight is one of those films in which revelations become plot points. The Catholic Church does what?! You’re kidding me. Wait, who knows exactly?! You’re kidding me. And it’s all swept under the curtain 
of blasé – nothing to see here; it’s just Boston. It IS just Boston, right? There’s honest work from all leads here, the best roles going to lawyers on the opposite sides of the morality spectrum: the eccentric Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci) fights for justice and the polished minion of evil, Eric Macleish (Billy Crudup) … does not.
This film will inevitably be compared to All the President’s Men, to which I say, bring it on – Spotlight is better. The former always felt anti-climactic to me, given what we know. Spotlight is the damning church send-up that The DaVinci Code wanted and failed to achieve. Personally, I attended Catholic school in Boston, the same one as writer/director McCarthy in fact. Does that matter? Not one bit – but my campus definitely had more than seventeen priests and I attended at a time when such abuse would have been silenced. Not just covered up – silenced. That thought gives me the creeps. I don’t say my school had anything to do with this, but on some level? Everybody associated with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church is guilty to some extent.
♪Well, let me tell you the story of a boy from Southie on a tragic and fateful day
He took the robes from his closet, said, “goodbye” to mommy, went to work on the morning pray
But did it ever return? No, it never returned.
There are lessons left unlearned.
It has died forever ‘neath St. Leo’s chapel
Innocence has forever been burned
Now you citizens of Boston, don’t you think it’s a scandal how the priesthood is in such decay?
“Fear not!” says the Bishop, “put your trust in me and your troubles will all go away.” ♫
Rated R, 128 Minutes
D: Tom McCarthy
W: Tom McCarthy, Josh Singer
Genre: Woodward and Bernstein
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Abuse victims
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Cardinal Law
♪ Parody inspired by “M.T.A.”
