UNITED STATES
World Socialist Web Site
By Joanne Laurier
3 November 2015
Directed by Tom McCarthy; screenplay by McCarthy and Josh Singer
Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight is a taut, quasi-political thriller that chronicles the Boston Globe’s landmark 2002 exposure of widespread child sexual abuse by Catholic priests in the Boston area.
The ‘Spotlight’ in the title refers to the newspaper’s four-person investigative unit that brought to light the long-term, systematic cover-up by Church officials of the abuse carried out by more than 70 local clergy. The Globe, having been recently acquired by the New York Times, won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for the story.
In McCarthy’s movie, the Spotlight team consists of its blunt editor Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton), reporters Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) and Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), and researcher Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James).
Spotlight opens with a brief sequence in which Father John Geoghan, a serial pedophile whose history of abuse was a factor in triggering the investigation, is walking out of a Boston police station a free man. (In his 30-year career, Geoghan molested at least 130 children.) The Globe’s new editor-in-chief Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber)—non-Bostonian and non-Catholic—pushes the Spotlight team to start looking into sexual abuse by priests.
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