A Spotlight on the Church

A still from Spotlight

After half a year of frenzied film festival hopping I got back to home base only to find a teetering pile of DVD and Blu-ray screeners and an inbox bursting with screening invites and iTunes downloads. We are in the middle of the run up to awards season and my task over the next few weeks is to watch all these movies and vote for them across categories.

One of the more arresting films I watched was Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight (2015). McCarthy debuted as a director in 2003 with The Station Agent, an indie drama about a diminutive person in search of solitude that won big at Sundance and won him a screenwriting BAFTA. The Visitor (2007) continued McCarthy’s chronicling of solitary men, this time following a Connecticut based professor who returns to his apartment in New York only to find an illegal immigrant couple squatting there. Richard Jenkins got an Oscar best actor nomination for his portrayal of the professor. In McCarthy’s Win Win (2011), Paul Giamatti is not solitary at all as a lawyer who is also a wrestling coach who must wrestle with the consequences of a debatable moral decision. I did not watch McCarthy’s The Cobbler (2014) simply because it stars Adam Sandler, who I do not have much time for these days though I will yield to no one in admiring his bravura turn in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (2002) and I have no shame in admitting that I watched Pixels (2015) because of nostalgia for 1980s video games.

Spotlight is easily one of the films of the year. Having begun my career in a newsroom, I am a sucker for films set in that environment but even in that rarefied sub-genre, Spotlight is a standout. Spotlight is the name of the crack investigative journalist team at the Boston Globe. In 2001, a new, Jewish, editor, asks the Spotlight team to take a look at a series of cases over 30 years where Catholic priests are accused of being sexual predators, molesting male and female minors. The team, hardened veterans all, set about their task with gusto. While the film does throw into the spotlight the inherent malpractices within the Catholic church (the Spotlight team are all lapsed Catholics), McCarthy delights in the dynamics of the newsroom and the mechanics of investigative journalism in a manner reminiscent of greats of the sub-genre including The Paper (1994), Park Row (1952) and All The President’s Men (1976). Michael Keaton, cruelly denied an Oscar for Birdman (2014), headlines the ensemble cast that has a jaw-dropping plethora of names including Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo, Stanley Tucci, Liev Schreiber and Billy Crudup, amongst many others.

Meanwhile, if another sub-genre, clerical sex abuse, is of interest, there are several excellent documentaries about the horrific subject matter including Deliver Us From Evil (2006), Twist of Faith (2005), Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (2012) and Sex Crimes and the Vatican (2006). As a character says in Spotlight: “If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse them. That’s the truth of it.”