UNITED STATES
Religion & Politics

By Mara Willard | November 9, 2015

Ppotlight, the film released on Friday, appears at first glance to be a scripted homage. The movie offers a fictionalized portrayal of the Boston Globe’s investigative “Spotlight” team, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its 2002 exposé of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Spotlight is this generation’s All the President’s Men, nostalgic enough to remind us of microfiche but timely enough to influence the very story that it depicts. The film’s paper chase is an energizing validation of the methods of investigative journalism honed in the 1970s. The Globe’s reporters of the early 2000s would have been raised on the cinematic depiction of American icons Woodward and Bernstein.

As the power of the presidency looms over Washington, so the Catholic Church reigns in Boston. And the drama of Spotlight is full of Irish Catholic lawyers, cops,…