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“Spotlight” is a labored reportage procedural that arrives a decade too late.
The story of the Boston Globe’s [“Spotlight”] editorial team’s earth-shattering exposure of the Boston Catholic Church’s systemic methods of committing and promoting pedophilia against thousands of children hit newsstands in January of 2002.
It would have been a good film to make in ’02 or ’03 when the story was hot, and could have brought more timely attention to the criminality being committed in the name of God.
Cardinal Bernard Law’s (played by Len Cariou) exposed corruption in the investigation proves that the chain of orchestrated and protected pedophilia goes all the way up to the top officials of the Boston Catholic Church, with considerable assistance from the city’s police, judicial system, and the media.
However shocking the Globe’s shocking discoveries about the number of pedophile priests being shuffled to new locations where they continue to prey on children, the year’s best investigative journalism was overshadowed by the then-recent events of 9/11.
In 2001, The Boston Globe’s newly hired editor-in-chief Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) assigns his [inherited] cracker-jack investigative team to look into victims of sexual abuse by priests. The Baron is curious about why the story hasn’t been followed up on. Michael Keaton is well cast as Spotlight editor Robby Robinson, who oversees writers Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), and Marty Campbell (Brian d’Arcy James).
The able cast do a lot with a little within tight genre script constraints that consists of ever-increasing a-ha moments when clues turn into facts, usually in a distinctly unglamorous place such as a broom closet. The movie plays it safe to a fault by sticking too closely to formula. Boston’s harsh climate of anti-semitism gets whitewashed out completely. Through dramatic license, Liev Schreiber’s Jewish newspaper editor (Marty Baron) escapes the real-life racist sentiments expressed by Boston’s predominantly Catholic citizenry at the time.
Everything smells of bleach.
The filmmakers smartly steer clear of exploiting the rough subject matter for the sake of shock value or dramatic effect, but slough into the realm of cheesy melodrama, as during a scene in which Ruffalo’s character loses his temper in a very actorly way. His oh-so-impassioned anger rings with a telling hollowness that infects the movie.
Still, the picture is culturally significant in that it keeps alive the public discussion about the Catholic Church’s ongoing crisis of pedophile priests taking sexual advantage of their powerful positions in communities around the world. This film’s greatest purpose may be that it gives the viewer a sense of the enormous scale of sexual abuse crimes that Catholic priests have committed, and continue to commit, all over the world.
Rated R. 128 mins.
