UNITED STATES
Washington Post
By Alyssa Rosenberg November 13
This post discusses the plot of “Spotlight” in detail.
In a conventional Hollywood movie, “Spotlight,” Tom McCarthy’s excellent new movie about the Boston Globe team that conducted the paper’s reporting on clerical sexual abuse, would end in a triumphant fashion.
After a period of intense reporting that involved a lawsuit against the Catholic Church, hours cultivating abuse victims who were skittish after years of being ignored and confrontations with powerful figures in Boston religious and legal communities, Walter Robinson (Michael Keaton), Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) and Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James) have finally published a damning story about the hierarchy’s complicity in protecting abusive priests and concealing their depredations. But rather than showing us a montage of the triumphant results of their work, priests being arrested and Cardinal Bernard Law being recalled to the Vatican, “Spotlight” returns to the cramped offices the film’s titular team shares. And their phones begin to ring, the lines flooding with calls from abuse victims coming forward to share their stories and revealing that the magnitude of the problem is even greater than the reporters had reckoned with.
That scene, and the choice to end on it, embody what makes “Spotlight” distinct as a movie both about journalism and about sexual assault. McCarthy is willing to tell a story where reporting is the beginning of a long process of reform, rather than the decisive stroke that ends an injustice. And it’s a reckoning with not just the behavior of individual priests, but the culture of a church and a city that enabled them to attack children.
There have been lots of fictional Bostons, but “Spotlight” is the rare film with a sense of the city’s clannishness. And McCarthy is finely attuned to the ways in which Boston’s tribal culture both made victims vulnerable and could be used to discredit anyone who dared to challenge its institutions and priorities.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.