"Spotlight" Review: Mark Ruffalo and Team Excavate Church Abuse Story

By Michael Phillips
Chicago Tribune
November 9, 2015

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/movies/sc-spotlight-mov-rev-1109-20151106-column.html

Nothing in the superb new film "Spotlight" screams for attention. It's an ordinary film in its technique, and it's relentlessly beige. It avoids fist-pounding, crusading-reporter cliches almost entirely, the ones the movies have loved since the first close-up of the front page rolling off the presses in high-speed replicate. The story is a big one, and the movie about how a handful of Boston Globe investigative reporters got that story is thrillingly good.

Most of "Spotlight" takes place in 2001. It seems a long way off now, closer to the era of "All the President's Men" — in some ways "Spotlight" is a better, less glossy picture — than to our own. For a cynical look at how far the press has fallen, or how low it's willing to limbo in the name of survival, seek another movie; for gassy fulminations about the state of political and corporate pressures, try "Truth." This one makes you believe in the mission, and the value a few journalists can bring to a society.

Director and co-writer Tom McCarthy played a weasel of a journalist in "The Wire." Now he has made a meticulous, exacting procedural on real-life journalists who excelled at their job; had the resources to do it properly; and in early 2002, published the first in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of grim, carefully detailed stories of pedophile priests. The most formidable institution in Boston preferred to keep the story from breaking. And they did, for decades.

"Spotlight" is no less concerned with the dynamic in any big city between the born-and-raised faction and the wary, mistrusted outsiders. There's a moment in McCarthy's film, co-written by Josh Singer, capturing this tension. It's an arranged meeting called by Cardinal Law (Len Cariou), who has invited the Globe's recently appointed editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) for a visit.