UNITED STATES
Los Angeles Review of Books
December 5th, 2015
IT’S A MOMENT we’ve seen dozens of times: the incorruptible newcomer summoned to an audience with the local heavy. On the surface, it’s a friendly meeting. The big shot is affable, welcoming. He offers to help the newcomer with anything he might need. Right below the surface, he’s issuing a warning: there’s a certain way things are done in this town, and if you’re smart, you won’t get in the way. Whether the scene is played out between a sheriff and a cattle baron, a crusading DA and a power broker who holds himself above the law, or an honest cop confronting a veteran on the take, we understand that the scene defines the stakes the hero is playing for, as well as the son of a bitch he’s going to have to go up against. It’s a measure of how uncompromised Spotlight is, then, that in this case, the s.o.b. is the head of the Boston Roman Catholic Archdiocese, Cardinal Bernard Law.
Spotlight is about what happened when, in 2001, the Boston Globe’s new editor, Marty Baron — the man called in for that sit-down with Cardinal Law (played as a pious old ward heeler by Len Cariou) — pushed the paper’s investigative reporting unit, the Spotlight team, to look into why a local priest who had molested more than 130 boys had been shuffled from parish to parish instead of turned over to the cops. What that four-person team uncovered was not a “few bad apples,” the term the Church and their defenders used to classify pedophile priests, but documentation that nearly 100 Boston-area priests had molested children and that in most of the cases, their superiors in the Archdiocese had known. The Spotlight team’s report, which ran in January 2002, won the Globe a Pulitzer Prize and effectively ended the career of Bernard Law, who resigned in 2002.
At least in America. Law was given a cushy Vatican appointment and with that, of course, the diplomatic status that would keep him from being extradited back to the States. But the effect of the Spotlight team’s work went far beyond Law. By shattering the few bad apples scenario, the Spotlight reporters — Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), and Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James) — identified child sexual abuse not as an aberration but an accepted practice within the Church, given no more thought than the way old-time pols regard the corruption within their ranks. If that sounds like an exaggeration, Spotlight ends with a list of cities in which child sexual abuse scandals have been uncovered in the Catholic Church. Beginning with the US and then moving to the rest of the world, the list takes up four screens of small triple-column type.
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