MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Herald
James Verniere Friday, November 06, 2015
From “The Front Page” and “His Girl Friday” to “All the President’s Men” and “The Paper,” America has been in love with newspaper movies. This gives “Spotlight,” a film from New Jersey-born director and co-writer Tom McCarthy (“Win Win,” “The Cobbler”) about the Boston Globe’s award-winning investigation into the Catholic church child sexual abuse scandal, both the urgency of front-page headlines and a certain backward, nostalgic air.
Remember newspapers? Weren’t they great?
The action begins in 2001. The New York Times-owned Globe has a new editor from Miami named Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber, nailing the guy’s “Visit to a Small Planet” aura). Not long after unpacking, Baron asks editor Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton, stellar), who is supervised by Managing Editor Ben Bradlee Jr. (John Slattery), and Robinson’s “spotlight” team of reporters — Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) and Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James) — to look into why no prosecutions have resulted from church payments to settle sexual abuse cases.
Holy Whitey Bulger, is it possible the Boston church has been able to suppress the truth for decades?
The screenplay by McCarthy and Josh Singer (“Fringe”) gives a shoutout to the Boston Phoenix, which broke the story, but it’s a left-handed compliment. The case involves “sealed documents” the church desperately does not want to come to light and the number of priests who have molested children in the Boston area and what disgraced Bernard Cardinal Law (Len Cariou, “Blue Bloods”) knew and when he knew it.
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