Growing up in a small-town newspaper family, I became fascinated early on with the idea of the city newsroom — a place where tenacious guys (and occasionally gals) in trenchcoats would dog sources, dig for the truth and use the power of the pen to make the world a better place. It’s this journalism that’s on display in Spotlight, the extraordinary new film based on the true story of The Boston Globe investigative team that exposed the Catholic hierarchy for protecting abusive priests.
We’ve been hearing about sexual abuse scandals for so long that our society has almost become numb to the news. Spotlight brings just the right amount of focus to the damaged and fragile victims who persevered year after year, trying to let people know that some of their most trusted authority figures — priests — had raped and molested them, right under the noses of a church that shuffled pedophiles from parish to parish, putting more vulnerable children in harm’s way.
Spotlight is a taut, pulse-pounding thriller. The all-star cast delivers realistic and transformative performances, among them Liev Shrieber as Marty Baron, the new editor who quietly insists that the investigative team drop its current project to start looking into whether the church’s top officials knew about the abuse. The reporters begin to dig, methodically and furiously, and learn about the phenomenal cover-up that protected nearly 90 priests. The level of complicity among Bostonians was shocking; under-the-table settlements were paid to mostly low-income Bostonians whose children were hushed, offered up for sacrifice. As rumpled reporter Mike Rezendes, Mark Ruffalo is pitch-perfect. He’s a bundle of nerves, darting through the streets to chase down the story and becoming increasingly angry as the truth unfolds. Yet he displays utter compassion when listening — truly listening — to the heartbreaking stories of victims.
Spotlight is full of memorable performances and lines, but one incisive comment from the lawyer representing victims, Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci), cuts to the chase: “If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.”
