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‘Spotlight’ a journalism movie that gets it right
By Bob Strauss
A story about a great job of journalism has been turned into a movie that may be the most journalistically scrupulous ever made. “Spotlight” recounts the Boston Globe’s eponymous investigative reporting team’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the local Catholic Archdiocese’s cover-up of what turned out to be a systemic pedophile priest scandal. The resulting 2002 series of some 600 articles revealed that more than 70 priests had been protected by the church, and triggered revelations of similar abuse by priests in 105 American cities and 102 dioceses throughout the world. Director Tom McCarthy (“The Station Agent,” “The Visitor”) and his co-writer Josh Singer (“The Fifth Estate,” TV’s “The West Wing”) spent months in Boston doing detailed research to create a screenplay and subsequent movie that feels infused with authentic detail about the investigation. The movie’s Spotlight team is played by Michael Keaton as editor Walter Robinson, Rachel McAdams and Mark Ruffalo as reporters Sacha Pfeiffer and Michael Rezendes, and Brian d’Arcy James as researcher Matt Carroll. Liev Schreiber is the Globe’s new executive editor Marty Baron, who came from the Miami Herald and on his first day in the newsroom requested Spotlight dig into the story of a single Boston priest, which grew into the much bigger effort. “Mad Men’s” John Slattery plays the Globe’s deputy managing editor Ben Bradlee Jr., whose father famously oversaw the Washington Post’s Watergate investigation so memorably dramatized in the 1976 film “All the President’s Men.” Len Cariou is Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law, who resigned his post at the end of 2002 in the wake of the newspaper’s expose. Long in development, the “Spotlight” project had certain obvious appeals for Catholic-raised New Jerseyite McCarthy, who went to school at Boston College. The filmmaker, who is also a professional actor, says he was more intrigued by the story than any personal connections he may have brought to it. “At first blush, it had a great hook,” McCarthy says. “Having lived in Boston, I know it’s a very particular kind of city, and there’s something so compelling about this guy coming in from Miami and on day one practically setting his sights on the Catholic Church. The more I delved into it, the more compelling it became.” Boston born-and-raised Robinson started working at the Globe in 1972 (the year of the Watergate break-in), taught college journalism for seven years and is now back at the Globe as an editor-at-large. He explains how New England’s establishment paper was shaken out of a certain complacent approach to the city’s most powerful religious institution by the soft-spoken but dogged Baron, who is now executive editor of the Washington Post. “What I think really motivated us ... We were asked by the new editor to look at one priest, and I like to say out of fear of the new boss we worked really hard to try to find out everything we could,” Robinson recalls. “Within a week or so, we found out that there were a whole bunch of others. We went back to Marty and said this guy’s just the tip of a very large iceberg, we don’t know how big it is but it could be, like, 12 or 15 priests. “Marty said, ‘Well, go for it.’ And that’s when we got involved in this five-month investigation before we first published.” Tracking down (sometimes reluctant to talk) victims, requesting sealed court records and combing through reams of church documents was just some of the reportorial legwork the Spotlight team put in. McCarthy seems intent on evoking that sometimes tedious process onscreen with the absolute minimum amount of dramatic license applied to make it, well, more dramatic than it was. That was a presentational choice from the get-go. “I think it has a very severe style,” McCarthy says of his critically acclaimed film. “There’s just rigorous restraint to it and there’s a subtlety to it. I met with my whole production team about not being too slick with this. I felt if we went too heavy with style that it would somehow undermine what we were saying about this very blue-collar approach to sort of boots-on-the-ground, local journalism.” Robinson was impressed by the filmmakers’ strategy in the best way an editor could be. “Sometimes, I think they did more reporting on us than we did on the church,” Robinson says. “Josh and Tom spent weeks and weeks in Boston interviewing us. We gave them lots of contemporaneous documents and even emails that helped us remember when certain things took place in time. There are actually a couple of things in the movie that are built off of emails from Marty Baron.” Even so, Robinson sounds surprised when he declares “And they got it right!” regarding the film’s depiction of reporting. He might be more impressed by something else about it, though. “The way they managed to tell the story of the victims in a way that an audience wouldn’t avert its eyes from,” the newspaperman says. “The way they did it in this film, I thought, does help people understand what really happened to these people when they were kids.” Robinson remembers that the four-member Spotlight team even learned something about one another that, although they had been working together for years, they hadn’t known before the church investigation: They were all lapsed Catholics. He also reports that the Spotlight team is bigger now than at the turn of the century, despite the fact that the Globe has just undergone another round of staff cutbacks like every newspaper has suffered in the Internet/Great Recession era. “In a way, you could look at this film as a eulogy to something that many of us feel has passed from our lives,” Robinson says. “And you’re talking about a group of mourners who really don’t believe in reincarnation. “I’m a little more optimistic,” he adds. “I don’t know how much longer newspapers will be publishing on paper, but the young kids whom I’ve been teaching are much more optimistic than us people who’ve been around forever. Where we see things falling apart, they see opportunities to do things on different platforms. My view is, good editors will always want good reporters, so there is a future.”
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