Spotlight: Movie Review

Premiering Nov. 25, 2015, the highly acclaimed film “Spotlight” reached theaters all around the country. The riveting plot, based on a true story, was enhanced by the star-studded cast of Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, John Slattery and by director Tom McCarthy. It has garnered three Golden Globe nominations and five Independent Spirit Awards, to name just a few.Spotlight is the name a small department of five investigative journalists working for The Boston Globe in 2001. The projects tackled by Spotlight require deep searches into primary sources to ensure accuracy in the ground-breaking topics. When the new editor Marty Baron (played by Liev Schreiber) moved to Boston from Florida to oversee the paper, he rattled the company with his foreign customs.Baron’s first order of business as Editor-in-Chief was to put the Spotlight team’s current case on hiatus in order to cover a story involving the accusation of rape by the current Archdiocese’s priest against a minor and how Cardinal Bernard Law had apparently thrown a blanket over it all. The team was reluctant to accept due to his position as an outsider. They believed that he didn’t have a grasp on the stories most important to the locals. But after dipping their toes into the research, it became alarmingly apparent that this case was a lot bigger than they had previously conceived. Bigger than one priest, and bigger than Boston.After tireless hours of page flipping in the publication’s archives and private interviews with victims, the team was able to generate a startlingly long list of names in the Boston area alone. These were people whose lives had been severely damaged by the sexual abuse they had endured, sometimes decades before, from the Catholic authority. The team proceeded with verification of these names through one-on-one visits with the survivors.This term “survivor” was explained by Phil Saviano (played by Neil Huff), founder of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. He articulated that the lives of the majority of those affected by sexual abuse from priests ended in suicide or emotional devastation because they felt robbed of their faith. He wanted it to be clear that those few sane victims still standing were only a fraction of the people affected by the scandal.In that moment, it quickly became evident to the five journalists that there was an underlying corruption in the Catholic church that had been strategically covered up for decades. According to their records, every time a new allegation arose against a priest for molesting a minor, the locational status of the priest would be recorded as “sick leave.” With further investigation, they unearthed the truth: that once they got wind of it, the Catholic authority would pay the bail, hide the criminal records and relocate the convicted priest, essentially circulating around the world and destroying lives of children in each new town or city.For a scandal of this size, the question immediately arose of how it could possibly have gone on so silently for so long. Baron, being from Florida and the first Jewish editor of The Boston Globe, explained to the Spotlight team that sometimes it takes an outsider to to see the flaws within such a familiar and trusted system.What started as a local case revealed the astonishing truths about not only a church, but a devastating operation that so many people were involved in. When The Globe’s article was finally released on the front page of their Jan. 6, 2002 issue, countless churchgoers were forced to rethink their beliefs, as the public news shook the Catholic Church to its core.To this day, individuals are still recovering from molestations with priests—whom they once considered the most honorable of men. The church is enduring the similarly painstaking process of mending their damaged reputation. The Spotlight team won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2003 for their devotion to moral justice on the case. A film based on the most intimate and delicate topic imaginable did, in my opinion, a stellar job balancing the horrific personal experiences of victims, and the enthralling career of investigative journalism.McCarthy designed the film with realistic images actually shot on the streets of Boston. The close of every scene was a cliffhanger and the opening of each new one was continuously beautiful. A risky, but wonderfully executed topic for a movie.