INDIA
Live Mint
Uday Bhatia
There are many great films about journalists, but only a few excellent ones about journalism. It’s easy to see why: journalists, those deadline-battling, chain-smoking mythical beings, make for naturally exciting cinema. But the actual stuff of journalism —the late nights and false starts, the endless cups of coffee, the decidedly unglamorous pursuit of a source for a quote—is tougher to weld into movie magic.
Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight is that rare film that is first and foremost about journalism.
Methodically but stirringly, it tells us of the time in 2001 when the Boston Globe —more precisely, the investigative “Spotlight” team of Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Walter Robinson (Michael Keaton), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) and Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James)—stumbled upon, investigated and reported a story on the Boston Catholic Church shielding priests guilty of sexual abuse. It’s a film about the many things, big and small, mundane and pivotal, that go into reporting something of this magnitude. (Note that McCarthy played a journalist in the last season of The Wire, another forensic look at a newspaper office.)
We see the story’s genesis in a staff meeting, with the paper’s newly appointed editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), bringing up a column about a lawyer named Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci) who claims to have proof that the Archbishop of Boston knew of a particular priest who’d molested children but had done nothing about it. Baron asks Robinson, head of Spotlight, to follow up. The team speaks to Garabedian, then to some of the victims and church officials. As they continue to dig, they realize the cover-up is on a much larger scale than they or anyone else had imagined.
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