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"Spotlight" a Top All-time Journalism Movie, One of the Best of 2015

By L. Kent Wolgamott
Lincoln Journal Star
November 20, 2015

http://journalstar.com/entertainment/movies/review-spotlight-a-top-all-time-journalism-movie-one-of/article_0d19042b-8e57-5099-8b71-8d5db9f72b45.html

In 2001, a new editor arrived at the Boston Globe from the Miami Herald. A newcomer, Marty Baron notices a column about a local priest accused of having sexually abused dozens of young parishioners over three decades.

Ignoring resistance from veteran staffers and those outside the newsroom who said taking on the Catholic Church in overwhelmingly Catholic Boston would be dangerous and destructive, Baron instructs the paper’s Spotlight team to follow up on the column -- and not just to seek out individual cases of abuse but to unearth the system that allowed the abuse to continue.

Two years later, the Spotlight team won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism for its reporting of the Church’s cover-up of pedophilia perpetrated by more than 70 priests.

“Spotlight” tells the story of the reporting team and its investigation with accuracy, great detail and an understanding of the journalists and their world. The drama is a compelling detective story, even though the final outcome of the investigation is known.

The accuracy begins with the performances by the primary cast, who met with the people they’re playing before they went before the cameras and, by all accounts, captured them on film.

That starts with Michael Keaton, who plays Walter “Robby” Robinson, the team’s leader -- he calls himself a “player coach” and a native Bostonian who went to the Catholic high school across the street from the Globe's office.

The reporters include Michael Rezendes, a driven outsider who remains part of the Spotlight team. He’s played by Mark Ruffalo, one of our best actors, who could very easily get another Oscar nomination for burrowing deep into another real-life character, ala his work in last year’s “Foxcatcher.”

Sacha Pfeiffer, a lapsed Catholic who attends church with her grandmother and is still at the Globe today, is played by Rachel McAdams, and the team’s data collection expert, Matt Carroll, is played with perfect unease by Brian d’Arcy James.

The other key players inside the Globe are, of course, Baron (Liev Schreiber), who steadily pushes the investigation no matter the cost to the paper; and editor Ben Bradlee Jr. (John Slattery), who urges caution in the investigation.

Outside the paper are attorneys Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci), who is bringing victims’ cases to the courts; Eric MacLeish (Billy Crudup), who arranged hushed-up settlements with victims; and Jim Sullivan (Jamey Sheridan), who is part of a group of powerful Bostonians assisting the Church in covering up the scandal.

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It’s notable that beyond a couple appearances by Len Cariou playing Cardinal Bernard Law, there are no active priests in the film. This isn’t a picture about the abusers, nor should it be. There is, however, plenty of testimony from their victims, starting with Phil Saviano (Neal Huff), who drops a box of material on the team early on.

The reporters move forward, with Pfeiffer sympathetically interviewing victims, Rezendes working the courts and trying to get Garabedian to talk to him, and Carroll looking for patterns that lead him to long-neglected official priest registries housed in the paper’s basement. Robinson, meanwhile, oversees the efforts and uses his access to MacLeish and Sullivan to try to get at what happened.

There are setbacks aplenty, some threats, a few reportorial missteps, an interruption in the investigation created by 9/11 and, finally, a rare cinematic acknowledgement of the writing process as director Tom McCarthy and his co-writer Josh Singer craft a dramatic, realistic, telescoped version of the Spotlight team story.

With dead-on recreations of newsrooms and the unfortunate, style-free dress of the journalists adding to the film’s accuracy, "Spotlight” becomes one of the best movies about journalism ever, right up there with “All the President’s Men,” the 1976 recounting of the Washington Post’s Watergate investigation.

“Spotlight” has deservedly emerged as one of the prime contenders for the Best Picture Oscar next year. It’s one of the two or three best movies of the year, so far.

 

 

 

 

 




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