I went to see Spotlight out of a sense of dreary duty. The movie is being touted as an Oscar possibility and has received rapturous reviews, neither of which is any guarantee of quality or enjoyment. Quite the opposite, in fact: Last year’s Oscar winner, Birdman, was similarly praised; I found it annoyingly pretentious and overdone. In addition, I’ve found the past work of its director and cowriter, Tom McCarthy, unsatisfying. His movies—The Station Agent, The Visitor, and Win Win—are intelligent and thoughtful, but they’re fussy and careful and they never really come alive.
To make matters worse, Spotlight sounded like the worst kind of activist-movie pap: an account of a brave group of reporters who expose a conspiracy by the Boston Archdiocese to bury information about sexually abusive priests. Having worked at newspapers myself on and off for 30 years, I feel about the often insanely false and wildly romanticized depictions on screen of the way newsrooms function, and the glamorized portraits of those who work in them, the way many people feel about nails upon a blackboard.
Finally, as I said in a recent piece, watching depictions of children in jeopardy or in pain on screen became almost unendurable after my first child was born 11 years ago.
So imagine my surprise when my dreary duty turned into something unexpectedly thrilling. Far from being homework, Spotlight is an utterly riveting piece of entertainment. More important, and more impressive, McCarthy and his cowriter Josh Singer have found a way to tell one of the most sordid and shocking tales of institutional corruption of our time without sensationalizing it, turning up the melodramatic heat, or being so direct in its depiction of the abuse that the film becomes agonizing to watch.
Instead of addressing its subject directly, Spotlight comes at the church sex scandal sideways. It features what is almost certainly the best portrayal of the day-to-day inner workings of a newspaper ever put on film. This is important, and not just for the enjoyment of people in the business. Even for those who have no reason to know how accurate its rendering really is, Spotlight’s offhandedly meticulous re-creation of the feel and sound and style of a newsroom—and the way a team of reporters and editors puts together an investigative project—provide exactly the kind of authority a “based on actual events” movie of this sort needs. Most fact-based projects strike so false a tone that they seem to take place in an alternate reality, and seem more like pageants than true stories.
The year is 2001, which means that the Boston Globe has yet to undergo the Internet-driven evisceration that has since left it (like almost all newspapers) a shadow of its former self. The Globe of Spotlight is still a powerful and wealthy behemoth with a staff large enough that the paper has been able to set aside a team of three reporters and a full-time editor to do long-term, large-scale investigations over the course of many months.
A new editor, Martin Baron (Liev Schreiber), arrives—the first non-Bostonian in the job. A quiet, shy, self-confident loner, Baron (now the editor of the Washington Post) asks his staff why no one has followed up one of the paper’s opinion columns about an abusive priest. No one has a good answer; indeed, one of the more brilliant aspects of the portrayal of the Globe is that it subtly makes clear just how its market dominance has made the paper self-satisfied and sclerotic.
The job falls to the “Spotlight” team, under the management of lifelong Bostonian Walter “Robby” Robinson. He’s played by Michael Keaton in a performance that will leave anyone who has ever worked at a newspaper in a state of shock. I don’t know how Keaton has done it, but he is the eerie embodiment of an old-school type that populated urban newsrooms for most of the 20th century: a no-nonsense, no-emotions, no-airs, few-words, intense Catholic guy who has forgotten more about the city he covers than any newcomer will ever be able to learn. I don’t know if this is true of Robinson himself—he was a foreign correspondent for many years—but there’s never been a more accurate representation of a newspaperman.
Robby and his team set about tracking down abusive priests through the testimony of their victims. But after they find evidence against 13 of them and take their case to Baron, he demurs. What they have is important, he says, but it’s not the story. The story is the system in which this was allowed to occur, in which priests guilty of felonious offenses escaped legal sanction and were transferred from parish to parish.
One of the reasons McCarthy’s earlier work was unsatisfying is that, because he seemed to be so keen to be tasteful and avoid unnecessary drama, there was not nearly enough of interest in the plot or characters to carry the story along. Here, his good taste and reticence turn out to be exactly what the story requires.
The efforts made by the Archdiocese to stymie the Spotlight team—and by inference, to stymie previous efforts to illuminate the dark goings-on—are glancing, subtle, and haunting. They aren’t menacing; they’re soothing, with pleas to keep things in the family, to consider the good working order of the city, to ensure the church’s good works are not interrupted. By this point, the number of priests involved has grown to 70, and the team has uncovered proof that the city’s beloved Cardinal Law was part of the cover-up.
Mark Ruffalo and the Broadway actor Brian d’Arcy James play Robinson’s fellow Boston lifers on the Spotlight team, while Rachel McAdams’s character is an Ohio transplant with a grandmother from Southie. All three—Mark Rezendes, Matt Carroll, and Sacha Pfeiffer—were, we are told, raised Roman Catholic but have lapsed. Late in the movie, Rezendes tells Pfeiffer that he always thought he would go back, would become a churchgoer, but that the things he has seen and learned have now made that impossible.
It’s the closest we get to an on-the-nose delivery of the film’s message, but by this point, McCarthy has earned it. Spotlight is the best movie I’ve seen this year.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
