Film review: Spotlight - when the pen was mightier than the Catholic Church

If there is a take-out line from McCarthy's understated but forceful filmic dramatisation of the small Boston Globe Spotlight investigative team's dogged exposés of the child sex abuse scandal in the city and published in 2002 it is this:

“It takes a village to raise a child, but it also takes a village to abuse it.”

It was the complicity of various powerful role players including three cardinals, several bishops, doctors, Catholic judges, lawyers, politicians, city grandees, school board members and police officers who knew of the repeated and systemic abuse of children – usually boys from working-class communities – that enabled the cover-up of this abuse to continue for over 34 years. So too the largely Catholic readership of the Boston Globe who seemed to have ignored or dismissed - until the final year-long Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé - the smaller accounts of abuse tucked away on the paper's inside pages. McCarthy's film does not shy away also from pointing out the failure of journalists, many of them Catholics, and the media, to pick up on this massive story much earlier.

Watch: Spotlight trailer

The silence and the cover-up was enabled in part by the power that the Catholic Church held over the community of Boston and its deference to the church. It was this that rendered these criminal acts “off-limits”, even while allegations about the same priests kept resurfacing.

It was only until the small Spotlight team at the Boston Globe, inspired by the arrival of an out-of-town editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), that the entire shameful edifice crumbled. In the end the team published around 600 stories on the scandal about abuses committed by 226 priests.

Schreiber plays Baron, “an unmarried man of the Jewish faith who hates baseball” with a quiet and reassuring confidence and strength that no doubt served to inspire the team. Baron, who these days edits Washington Post, is portrayed as a quietly powerful albeit humourless man, who brings with him the cool reserve and distance of the “outsider”.

Schreiber's performance as Baron also highlights the crucial role of an editor in inspiring and then supporting a team consumed by an investigation that requires months and months of fearless slog work, disturbing face-to-face interviews and the meticulous scouring of mounds of documents to uncover hidden evidence. Baron was also an editor who understood when and how to “do the right thing”, when to publish and when to hold back, in the long-term interest of justice rather than circulation and profit.

Baron's no 2 was Ben Bradley Jr, (played by John Slattery), who was the Assistant Managing Editor of the Boston Globe responsible for investigations and projects. With the drive and support of both these men the Spotlight team was able to do its work as a warrior for justice for the hundreds of children who had been abused by Catholic clergy in Boston and ultimately also the thousands more in the rest of the world.

This small unit, which often worked in secret, was led by Walter Robinson (Michael Keaton) and consisted of Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), a pushy and relentless reporter of Portuguese origin who sniffs blood and follows each new lead as these come to light, Matty Carroll (Brian d'Arcy James) a family man who quietly goes about the backroom work required, and Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) another diligent and dedicated member of the team. McCarthy develops each of the characters enough for us to glimpse what animates them but, again, never at the expense of the story or its victims such as those searingly rendered by Michael Cyril Creighton and Jimmy LeBlanc.

The power and artistry of Spotlight, scripted by McCarthy and Josh Singer, is that the unfolding drama keeps its focus tightly on what matters – the investigation. The viewer is taken on an insider journey – including the court challenges – of what it takes to embark on and accomplish a story with so much at stake.

The film has been shot with care and attention to detail, avoiding any gimmickry that will detract from the plodding work. The stories of the victims are never lost as we follow the trail along with the journalists. McCarthy's palette is muted, costumes understated and the drama between the characters limited to when it is only completely necessary.

McCarthy who wrote and directed, among others, The Station Agent (2003), The Visitor (2007) and Win Win (2011) renders the Boston Globe and its journalists in the nonchalant manner befitting of a busy, working newsroom. These are not the celebrity journalists who are so often a feature in fictional films of this nature.

In the early internet age of 2001, newspapers such as the Boston Globe, were at the height of their power. The film shows the newspaper being printed and squads of vans leaving in the early to deliver it across the city. It was a time when the laborious task of investigative journalism was supported by finance, the resources and the experience to undertake the grueling and demanding job. It was also an era when an investigation such as this one was able to hasten justice and topple the once “untouchable” might of an institution such as the Catholic Church.

Like most other established titles today's Boston Globe is a different animal from its 2001 incarnation. In 2009, the New York Times Company, which owned the paper, threatened to close it if unions did not agree to a massive $20 million cost-saving initiative.

These cuts included decimating staff reductions, the elimination of 50 full-time jobs as well as halting all part-time jobs in editorial sections. While the Boston Newspaper Guild fought these drastic measures it eventually had to accept a deal. In 2011 the paper launched a dedicated subscription-based website. In 2013 the Boston Globe was bought by John W Henry, owner of the Boston Redsox, for $70 million. ( New York Times Company bought The Boston Globe in 1993 for $1.1 billion.)

The paper is a now a shadow of the publication that features in Mc Carthy's Spotlight, its business model eviscerated by online competition.

Investigative journalism is a costly but vital arm of the media. Without it, those children who were abused as the metaphorical village that was Boston looked away, would never have found justice. Without it, hundreds of priests who had abused children, would still be in circulation. Without it, the Catholic Church would not have had to confront itself.

In South Africa today with circulations tanking, it is more vital than ever that these investigative units, where they exist (often supported by philanthropists) are supported and valued. The space for the kind of work highlighted in Spotlight is narrowing, increasingly threatened not only by legislation but by media owners who respond to threats by appeasing political and commercial powers rather than readers and wider society. Spotlight is not only a powerful movie, but a stark reminder of the things we could soon lose en route to a totalitarian society, dying of thirst in the ocean of false information. DM

Photo: Michael Keaton as Walter "Robby" Robinson, Liev Schreiber as Marty Baron, Mark Ruffalo as Michael Rezendes, Rachel McAdams as Sacha Pfeiffer, John Slattery as Ben Bradlee Jr, Brian d'Arcy James as Matt Carroll.