Spotlight is by far the best and the most authentic film about journalism since All the President’s Men (1976). But Spotlight is not just a film about journalism, it is a work of journalism unto itself. The impeccable screenplay is inexhaustibly researched and the film follows it verbatim, keeping the film-making very simple: master-shots, over-the-shoulder shots, and a few montage sequences.
Spotlight tells the true story of a team of investigative journalists (the Spotlight team), at the Boston Globe newspaper, who exposed child sex abuse cases by priests in the city of Boston, Massachusetts, and the systematic cover up by the Catholic Church. It soon turned out that the sex-crimes by the priests is a worldwide psychological phenomenon. The most shocking thing is that none of the priests are put in jail or even fired, they are just sent to a different parish (a Church district) where they commit the crimes all over again.
In 2001, a lawyer in Boston stated he had 84 clients who had all been sexually molested or raped by a single priest, and the Archbishop of Boston knew about it for 30 years. When the new editor at the Boston Globe newspaper found out about it, he asked the Spotlight team to investigate the matter immediately.
Strangely, no one else was really interested to delve into the matter further, as it dealt with the Church. It must be understood Catholics believe the priest is their direct connection to God. After all, the Roman Catholic Church is the oldest governing institution (2,000 years old). The administration has an area-based (diocese) hierarchy: priests, bishops and archbishops. Just like most countries have presidents, there are over 5,100 Catholic Bishops globally, and the president of all the presidents is the Bishop of Rome, aka the Pope. The current US president is the 44th president in office, while the current Pope is number 266 and his term is lifelong (called the Pontificate). Watch We Have a Pope (2011) to get a clear idea how detached Vatican City (the headquarters of the Church) is from the rest of the world.
But I don’t think writer-director Tom McCarthy made the film just to expose the wrongdoings of the Catholic Church. a more in-depth analysis about the Church pedophilia has been provided by two excellent documentaries, Deliver Us from Evil (2006) and Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (2012). Tom McCarthy made the film as a tribute to great journalists all over the world, the people who make the powerful accountable to the powerless. Sadly, advertising and not circulation is the primary source of funding for many newspapers today; and whenever the people who read the papers become secondary to the business community, the newspaper cannot survive. At the beginning of Spotlight the new editor announces his goal: to make the newspaper essential to its readers.
The entire cast is excellent but there was no evidence of one-upmanship here, they all worked as a team. Such generosity by the cast and crew is quite rare. Everyone seemed to have only one purpose – to show how selfless and dedicated great journalists are and how important investigative journalism is for our freedom.
