A Brilliant Film with Such Explosive Subject Matter It Died Several Deaths before Being Made

By Stephanie Bunbury
Sydney Morning Herald
January 22, 2016

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/spotlight-a-brilliant-film-with-such-explosive-subject-matter-it-died-several-deaths-before-being-made-20160119-gm99v6.html

They don't make films like Spotlight any more, so people say. Perhaps they never really did. Spotlight is about a real-life team of investigative reporters at the Boston Globe who worked for months to document and finally reveal the cover-up by the local Catholic church of the sexual abuse of children by priests. What Spotlight is not about: star performances (even though its ensemble cast includes Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdam); the reporters' personal lives; plot twists or emotional peaks and troughs; reporters as heroes. There is just work: the painstaking, paper-shuffling, probing work of accumulating facts and corroborating them to the point where a newspaper – that hulking, old-fashioned, barely lamented old warhorse of the Fourth Estate – can speak authoritative truth to power. And, as signposted by its six Oscar nominations, it is absolutely gripping.

The Spotlight team's investigation came relatively late in the saga of sex-abuse scandals within the church; the series, which would eventually top 600 articles as more people came forward with stories and more priests were exposed, won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 2003. One thing Tom McCarthy's film makes clear, however, is that Boston is a staunchly Catholic city where the Church, schools, sport and government are clubbily intertwined. Fifty-five per cent of their readers were practising Catholics. "The church had such power," says Walter "Robbie" Robinson, the real head of the Spotlight unit, played by Michael Keaton in the film, "that if legislation it didn't like was before the Massachusetts Legislature, they could get it killed."

Not that the Globe felt compromised. Successive metro-section editors had run stories for years about accused and convicted priests in the normal run of its news coverage, earning a rebuke and an invocation of heavenly punishment from the local cardinal in the process. Even so, it took the arrival of an editor from outside Boston – Marty Barron, who came from the Miami Herald and would go on to become executive editor of the Washington Post – to lift the lid on the whole can of worms. "Don't go after the man; go after the system," he tells the team early in Josh Singer's script, which has reportedly cleaved as closely as possible to the facts even down to what was said. So they do.

Rachel McAdams as Sacha Pfeiffer, Mark Ruffalo as Michael Rezendes and Brian d'Arcy James as Matt Carroll, in a scene from the film, Spotlight. Photo: Kerry Hayes