UNITED STATES
The Independent (UK)
Rupert Cornwell Washington @IndyVoices
It’s called Spotlight, after the name of The Boston Globe’s in-house investigative reporting unit. It opens in Britain next month. And it may just be the finest film about journalism that’s yet been made.
Let’s start with the place: America’s most Catholic city: Boston, with its dark-panelled clubs, its Brahmin caste with family ties to the very founding of America, its liberal and decent flagship newspaper, its Irish and Italian tribes, and its fanatical embrace of the local sports teams, none more so than the Red Sox. Into this ordered, generations-old universe steps a complete outsider, the Globe’s new editor, Marty Baron. He is a Floridian by birth, Jewish by faith and he hates baseball.
In his very first days on the job in 2001, a Globe column catches Baron’s eye; it’s about paedophile priests, a topic that has frequently cropped up, but which has never been properly investigated. Maybe the paper had never really tried, aware that some 55 per cent of its readers were Roman Catholics, and daunted by a sense that the church measured its existence not by human lifespans but by eternity.
Midway through the film comes a wonderful scene where the outsider meets the ultimate insider. Baron is paying a courtesy visit to Cardinal Bernard Law, Archbishop of Boston, close to the Pope and the Curia in Rome and probably America’s mightiest Catholic churchman of his day. Ah, says Law, the city works best when our two great institutions work in tandem. Baron gently demurs. As he leaves, the cardinal summons an underling to give the editor a present. Baron unwraps it in his car as he leaves. It is the Catholic catechism.
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