Review: Spotlight

Spotlight (15)

USA 2015  129 mins  Dir: Thomas McCarthy  Starring: Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Stanley Tucci, John Slattery, Billy Crudup

Journalists adore films about fellow hacks, so Thomas McCarthy’s fact-based account of the exposure of a child abuse cover-up within the Boston archdiocese of the Catholic Church was guaranteed plenty of coverage even before it received Oscar nominations in all the main categories. And this is very much a film about a meticulous journalistic investigation. Anyone hoping for lurid images of leering paedo priests bearing down on small boys’ bottoms or a heart-rending in-depth exploration of the victims’ trauma is likely to come away disappointed.

Spotlight establishes its authenticity immediately with a setting that every journalist will recognise. Against the backdrop of plummeting circulation and advertising revenue, a new editor arrives trailing rumours that he’s a hatchet man brought in as part of a short-sighted strategy to preserve profits by sacking large swathes of the workforce. It’s 2001 and Martin Baron (Liev Schreiber) is very much an outsider at the Boston Globe, not least because he’s a Jew from Miami who finds himself overseeing a staff made up almost entirely of local Catholics. He immediately rejects the way the paper cosies up to local institutions, especially the Catholic Church, and announces his intention to make it “essential to its readers”. One story in particular catches his eye. A lawyer claims that Cardinal Law, the Archbishop of Boston, knew that a paedophile priest had been abusing children and chose to do nothing about it. Concerned that his paper seems to have shown no interest in following this up, he instructs the sceptical, four-strong Spotlight investigative team to drop everything and start digging. With tenacious Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) and Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) doing much of the spadework under the direction of team leader Walter ‘Robby’ Robinson (Michael Keaton), the scale of sexual abuse turns out to be far greater than anyone anticipated, as does the lengths to which the Church has been prepared to go to protect the guilty.

A gripping newsroom drama-cum-detective story, Spotlight gets just about everything right, from the grey reality of day-to-day journalism to its refusal to deify the hacks who eventually bagged a Pulitzer Prize. Their own culpability in failing to investigate evidence that had been dropped in their laps on more than one occasion is a key part of a film that is essentially about a cover-up in which the entire community connived, wittingly or otherwise. Or as Stanley Tucci’s lawyer puts it succinctly: “It might take a village to raise a child, but it also takes a village to abuse one.” The ability of powerful institutions and individuals to co-opt, corrupt and silence is something that continues to have resonance to this day in the Savile investigation – though the prolific DJ fiddler didn’t have the advantage of pretending to have a hotline to God in order to command unquestioning genuflection and intimidate and discredit his victims. To its credit, the Spotlight team gets the bit between its teeth once the painful truth begins to emerge and refuses to permit the Church to mount the cynical ‘one bad apple’ damage-limitation defence by delaying publication until a top-down, systemic cover-up can be proven. Impressively, the film also goes one step further by airing the claim that child abuse by priests amounts to a syndrome, with roots in the Church’s insistence on their celibacy.

Unfolding mainly in unflatteringly lit offices, this is a drama of real characters rather than caricatures, expertly played and skilfully directed. Moral outage is here too, but McCarthy never overplays it. The result is unlikely to get a screening at the Vatican anytime soon, but it is arguably the best – and certainly the most honest – film about journalism since All the President’s Men. And if you’re looking for a connection, raffish Mad Men star John Slattery plays the Globe’s deputy managing editor, Ben Bradlee Jr. Nobody mentions it in the film, but his father oversaw Woodward and Bernstein’s exposure of the Watergate scandal as executive editor of the Washington Post back in 1972.