UNITED STATES
Religion & Politics
By Mara Willard | November 9, 2015
Ppotlight, the film released on Friday, appears at first glance to be a scripted homage. The movie offers a fictionalized portrayal of the Boston Globe’s investigative “Spotlight” team, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its 2002 exposé of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Spotlight is this generation’s All the President’s Men, nostalgic enough to remind us of microfiche but timely enough to influence the very story that it depicts. The film’s paper chase is an energizing validation of the methods of investigative journalism honed in the 1970s. The Globe’s reporters of the early 2000s would have been raised on the cinematic depiction of American icons Woodward and Bernstein.
As the power of the presidency looms over Washington, so the Catholic Church reigns in Boston. And the drama of Spotlight is full of Irish Catholic lawyers, cops, editors, and judges. According to the movie, it takes an outsider to this world to fully question its power structures. Newly arrived at the Boston Globe from the Miami Herald, editor Martin Baron (played with dispassionate intensity by Liev Schreiber) gets a few sideways glances for his own faith and background. “So the new editor of the Boston Globe is an unmarried man of the Jewish faith who hates baseball,” is the dry observation of one archdiocesan insider. Baron, who refuses Red Sox tickets at one point, is shown reading the Globe in a scene at a coffee shop, while Mass empties out across the street.
Baron upturns the city’s status quo of conspiracy and denial by filing a legal motion to unseal certain court documents, which would uncover key internal documents from the Archdiocese of Boston. “You’re going to sue the Church?” he is asked repeatedly by nervous Globe staffers. Baron pushes his team to look further into the Catholic sexual abuse allegations. (Incidentally, Baron is now the top editor at Woodward’s Washington Post.) “Show me the church manipulated the system … Show me that this was systemic—that it came from the top down,” he tells the reporting team.
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