ISRAEL
Haaretz
Uri Klein Jan 28, 2016
“Spotlight,” directed by Tom McCarthy (“The Station Agent,” “The Visitor”), is a melodrama that manages not to be melodramatic, and that is its main virtue. We’ve seen quite a few pictures about journalists who take on a powerful institution (Alan J. Pakula’s “All the President’s Men” from 1976 is the paradigmatic example) or spend years pursuing an elusive target (e.g., David Fincher’s 2007 movie “Zodiac”). But while those films had a melodramatic side that provided a great deal of suspense, what makes “Spotlight” effective is how dry it is.
This virtue is especially notable given that the story involves a team of four investigative journalists for The Boston Globe (they form a team nicknamed “Spotlight”) who fight to expose numerous cases of child molesting within the Catholic Church in Boston and the cover-up engineered by church officials. The church is particularly powerful in Boston because much of the population is Catholic – as are many readers of The Boston Globe, who might resent seeing this kind of exposé in their paper.
The movie opens with a prologue taking place in 1976, when a priest accused of molesting children is arrested and then released to the church, which is supposed to deal with him by its own means. “Spotlight” is openly critical of The Boston Globe and other Boston newspapers for ignoring this and similar cases, which were reported only in short items relegated to the inside pages of the paper. The story then moves to 2001, when Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) becomes the new editor of The Boston Globe. The first Jew ever to hold this position, he is determined to look into the matter and assigns the task to the Spotlight team.
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