BOSTON (MA)
WBUR
WRITTEN BY
Joyce Kulhawik
PUBLISHED
November 4, 2015
The scandal broke on Jan. 6, 2002, the Feast of the Epiphany — and what a revelation.
On that Sunday, The Boston Globe Spotlight team released the first in a series of articles that would earn them a Pulitzer Prize and cast light on a story that had been festering in the dark corners of Catholic parishes around Massachusetts for decades: Priests had been molesting children while church officials knew and did nothing to stop it. In fact, the church hierarchy enabled the offenders to have access to more and more victims by hiding the perpetrators’ crimes and shifting them from parish to parish where they could continue “preying upon” instead of “praying for” the families who relied on them most for spiritual help.
The new film “Spotlight” is a killer exposé, a multifaceted, lucid and deeply potent account of what it took for the Globe’s investigative unit to uncover the sex abuse scandal that would culminate in Cardinal Bernard F. Law’s resignation and rock the very foundations of the Catholic Church. It is also a study in communal blindness, willful and accidental. Most important of all, the film is not only gripping but also steadfastly accurate — and we here in Boston would know.
The film was shot on location and many of the key players are still very much around: Boston Globe reporters Mike Rezendes, Sacha Pfeiffer, Matt Carroll (now at MIT’s Media Lab) and Spotlight editor Walter “Robby” Robinson. Former editor Marty Baron is now at The Washington Post. They must all love their casting here.
Director Tom McCarthy, who co-wrote the screenplay with Josh Singer, worked closely with the key Globe players to keep it honest, and so the movie begins where it should — at ground zero, with the victims, and never loses sight of them.
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