UNITED STATES
Dallas Observer
BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREKTUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2015
Newspapers are dead, except in the hearts of anyone who has ever loved them — which means there are still narrow slivers of hope. One of them now comes to us in the form of a movie: Tom McCarthy’s bold, shirtsleeve-sturdy newsroom drama Spotlight, which shows how a team of Boston Globe reporters exposed the scope of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church not just in Boston but worldwide. The film is less an elegy for the art and craft of news reporting than a rallying cry. If journalism were really dying, how could it inspire art this vital? Though it’s set in 2001 and early 2002 — practically ancient times in the distressing recent history of newspapers — Spotlight feels both timeless and modern, a dexterously crafted film that could have been made anytime but somehow feels perfect for right now.
This is also the story of the difference an outsider can make in a historically clannish city: The picture opens with a prologue, set in 1976, that dramatizes in fleet shorthand the way the Boston Archdiocese had, for many years, quickly and efficiently dealt with clergy members who’d molested children — by hustling those priests into a “treatment center” and then off to a faraway parish, where the cycle could all too easily be repeated. Flash forward to the summer of 2001, when the pedigreed Boston Globe gets a new editor, direct from the less highborn Miami Herald: Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) hadn’t grown up in Boston, as many Globe reporters and editors had; he was also Jewish, as many Globe reporters and editors were not.
But in his early days at the paper, after reading a seemingly minor piece by columnist Eileen McNamara about the archdiocese’s propensity for covering up abuse cases, Baron picks up on a potentially explosive story that seems obvious to him, while everyone else treats it as business as usual. Baron, low-key to an almost comical degree, asks his staff if the church’s record of protecting sex offenders isn’t something the paper should be looking into. The protests and excuses come from all sides, including deputy managing editor Ben Bradlee Jr. (John Slattery) and longtime reporter and editor Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton), who together lead the paper’s Spotlight team, a crew of reporters devoted to long-term investigations. No one wants to tangle with the church in Boston, or with the aggressively affable and unnervingly powerful Cardinal Law (played, with creepy precision, by Len Cariou). But Baron, seemingly with little more than an arched eyebrow, persuades the Spotlight staff to investigate.
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