Why Spotlight must be watched
There have been several movies about journalistic investigation, from Alan J Pakula's 1976 drama All The President's Men to David Fincher's 2007 procedural thriller Zodiac, but there's one aspect of Thomas McCarthy's Spotlight which makes it a movie that is much more than just an account of the exposé in question.
In the summer of 2001, The Boston Globe gets a new editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), who decrees the investigative team "Spotlight" to gather information and publish articles about a case of child molestation by priest John Geoghan. The team comprises Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) and is headed by Walter "Robby" Robinson (Michael Keaton).
Spotlight is not just a dexterously modulated procedural, but it brims with details that work their way into the story, where every piece of information we learn from the story provides insights that are resonant with the society today, even though the story is about 15-years-old.
It is revealed later that The Boston Globe was given several heads-up about such cases in the past but the paper either ignored them or published the stories in a low-key form in order to not alienate the reader base. The film doesn't shy away from giving the protagonists a gentle rap on the knuckle. In one of the many memorable lines from the film, Mitchell Garabedian, an attorney who works with the victims of such abuses, remarks, "If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse them."
So in effect, the Spotlight team's findings aren't a closely guarded secret where a bunch of good guys are up against a conniving establishment (as was the case with the Watergate scandal, which formed the basis of All The President's Men) but an open secret.
The information that's unearthed by the Spotlight team is itself something that's already known to everyone but owing to the deferent nature of the city, no one wants to talk about it and everyone (including the Spotlight team) is in one way or another complicit in brushing it under the carpet.
This is where the crucial detail about the character of the new editor of the paper comes into the picture. Baron is an outsider. He had previously served as an executive editor of the Miami Herald and he doesn't quite belong to the environment he is in - he's a Jew in the largely Catholic city of Boston, he's unmarried and he isn't interested in baseball.
Baron doesn't get a lot of screen time, and much of the actual work in the movie is done by Pfeiffer, Robby and Rezendes; but it's worth noting that the three Bostonians don't actually get to the information that's been sitting in their own backyard for years until an outsider pushes them to do so.
The movie also constantly keeps surprising us with the subtle nature of its twists - refreshingly unusual for a procedural, there are no grand revelations in the movie, and the twists that do exist are in the form of how the film subverts our expectations with regard to this type of a film.
The villains here are largely absent, only heard about but never actually seen, and when Sacha finally does get to have a word with one of the retired priests with accusations of molestation, he plainly admits that he did it, that it was normal to fool around with kids.
Its such clever touches that give the film its richness - in a lesser movie, this priest would have been either remorseless or would have refused to talk to the reporter in order to avoid getting exposed - but by having him coolly point at how normal his acts were, the film ends up making a far larger point without much fuss.
What starts as an investigation of a particular case expands into being about several such cases - there are about 90 priests in Boston alone that have harassed children. In one very moving scene, one of the victims of child sexual abuse, now a grown up gay man, explains to Sacha the point of view of a child when a priest makes advances towards them ("It feels like a call from God himself.")
Also, the film remarkably makes it seem like everyone in the social spectrum is on the same plane - the lawyers who defend the priests in these cases are also close friends with the reporters of Spotlight. One crucial boost to the team's quest is provided by the lawyer who cries, "I was just doing my job."
The scene doesn't go for cheap sentimentality but in the very next moment implicates Robby, who was responsible for ignoring tips about the cases the paper had received in the early days of his career. As is typical for movies gunning for the Oscars, the protagonists here are very much amiable good guys, but the distinguishing factor is that they're all, in a way, part of the same system they've picked up cudgels against.
The message is pretty simple in its novelty - but it isn't simplistic; and is instead derived from an intelligent enquiry into the complex framework of the legal, journalistic, religious and individual factors which contributed to the racket and helped unmask the same.
Another noteworthy thing about Spotlight, and what makes it unlike any other movie about such investigations, is its rootedness in the tangible - precisely the fact that the events of the film unfold during 2001-'02, the time when the Information Age was just around the corner.
The movie is set in a transition phase, and much of the drama in the film comes from the Spotlight team rummaging through old files, clippings and directories. The only obstacle the protagonists of the film have to overcome in most scenes is that of material records.
One of the victims, who now runs an NGO for others like him - the now famous but the then nascent SNAP (Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests) - remarks that he had sent all the information they needed in a box five years ago. Elsewhere, a humorous moment involves Ruffalo's character reasoning with a judge to allow him access to a legal motion which is in public domain, and then has to bribe the receptionist because the photocopy facility of the office is closed.
Helped greatly by superb screenplay and performances, Spotlight, although a film about ugly revelations, never compromises its humaneness. But it is also an elegy to the era of print media, when finding out an old bit of information meant trudging through huge stacks of paper.
"Spotlight" received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. It is now playing in theatres.