UNITED STATES
Huffington Post
David Edmund Moody
Spotlight is a message movie – not often a promising foundation for either entertainment or art.
But Spotlight succeeds where lesser message movies fail because of its unerring sense of direction in illuminating the source of evil in a complex social network. The pedophilia rampant among the Catholic clergy in Boston some fifteen years ago was hidden for decades before the Boston Globe broke the story. Spotlight hammers home the point that these were not just isolated cases, but part of an institutional disease that affected the Church at the highest levels of its hierarchy.
That institutional disease, moreover, was not confined to the Church, but had ramifications throughout Boston – indeed, the Globe itself had participated in burying the story years earlier. The dots were there to be connected long before the Globe published the facts, had anyone wanted to look – but no one did. Priests molesting choirboys? Playing strip poker with and soliciting oral sex from twelve-year-olds? Nobody even wanted to think about it.
Mark Ruffalo plays the reporter whose diligence and determination to uncover the truth ultimately succeeds against all odds. The reporter has just the right mix of street smarts and scruffy chutzpah to make all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. Ruffalo is a master of the puzzled glance, ingratiating body language, quick repartee and other accouterments of finesse as a maturing actor.
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