“Spotlight” is a gripping, Oscar-worthy thriller that brilliantly shows how the Boston Globe exposed the longtime coverup of the sexual abuse of minors by dozens of priests in that city’s Catholic Church.
Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams and Brian d’Arcy James play the Globe’s Spotlight investigative team reporting to editor Ben Bradlee Jr. (John Slattery), whose dad was the legendary Washington Post editor you may be familiar with from “All the President’s Men.’’
Like that classic, director Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer’s incisive script for “Spotlight’’ keenly understands how a newspaper works, which in 2001 was still remarkably similar to the 1970s. When an outsider from Miami (played by Liev Schreiber) is named top editor, he asks the Spotlight team, headed by Walter Robinson (Michael Keaton), to focus on molestation allegations the Globe had never pursued vigorously.
What the film really gets right is how journalists can get co-opted by the institutions they cover — in this case, the Archdiocese of Boston and the powerful Cardinal Bernard Law (Len Cariou) — and just how much courage it takes to pursue a story that may alienate many of the paper’s readers. Starting with stories concerning a single priest who may have abused as many as 80 children, the reporters dig in, talking to previously ignored victims. They learn that scores of claims have been privately settled by the church outside the legal system, and that access to those that landed in court mean taking on the church’s lawyers.
There is no single Deep Throat in this quest for all the cardinal’s men. Reporters have to repeatedly coax lawyers (Stanley Tucci, Billy Crudup, Jamey Sheridan) bound by confidentiality agreements for leads. Annual directories published by the archdiocese itself allows the team to document 90 accused clerics moved from parish to parish between stays in church-run rehabilitation programs.
The Globe ultimately published more than 600 articles, winning a 2003 Pulitzer Prize, forcing the Vatican to reassign Cardinal Law and triggering worldwide investigations of the church’s coverups of abuses by thousands of priests. Brilliantly acted by the year’s most carefully assembled cast, “Spotlight’’ is one of the year’s best films, showing just how hard it is to uncover painful truths.