UNITED STATES
The Concordian
Posted by: Elijah Bukreev
The Oscar race kicks off with Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight, an awards front-runner par excellence
Before a problem can be fixed, it must first be brought to light, which can be a painful process.
Sexual abuse of children by a number of Catholic priests was ongoing for decades, and it was only in 2001 that members of The Boston Globe’s investigative unit, the Spotlight Team, took on the Catholic Church to challenge a system that effectively covered up sex crimes and allowed sexual predators to walk free.
This investigation is the focus of Spotlight, a new film drama by Tom McCarthy which shares stories of abuse survivors while paying tribute to the journalists who fought hard to let these voices be heard.
The appointment of a new editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), signals a change at the paper. Baron is an outsider—a Jewish man from Miami in a predominantly Catholic city—which gives him a broader perspective. He sees a problem and decides to use any available resources to tackle it, even if it means suing the Catholic Church.
What starts with a single case of sexual abuse by a priest in Boston becomes an investigation into an actual epidemic, as numbers of perpetrators—and survivors—grow into the hundreds, and it becomes clear that lawyers and high-ranking clergy members were involved in a cover-up.
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