My Blog
"Spotlight," Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church Scandal
Note: This month it’s another Movie of the Week.
Like I said in The Danish Girl post, all the big movies this year are true stories or from true events. What’s up with that? Anyway, Spotlight was the name of the Boston Globe‘s team of crack investigative journalists. They were the ones who broke the story about the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.
I knew about the story and the scandal, of course, but I didn’t get the real horror of it until this movie. I didn’t realize the scope of the issue and I had no idea the damage it did to the victims. That the Church did know and knew how widespread it was, and made the conscious choice to let it continue is so egregious, it’s hard to see how the Church survived.
The movie has a stellar cast: Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo – who is suddenly ubiquitous – Liev Schreiber, Stanley Tucci, Billy Cruddup, to name a few. And they are all wonderful. It’s hard to single one out, largely because they were such a good ensemble. That term is thrown around a lot, but I don’t think it’s always used correctly. It does not refer simply to a group of performers, be it on film or in the boardroom. It refers to a group where if you remove one player, the others don’t work right. That term rightly applies here.
One of the best things about the movie is that it is true; it’s not just based on true events. As you watch the film, you discover the details right along with the Spotlight team as they discover one unbelievable detail after another. Not only did the Church know what was going on, so did some lawyers. Some even tried to take action, but the Church was just too powerful and shut them down at every turn.
The Boston Globe knew, and did nothing. They received a letter from one of the victims ten years before the investigation and did nothing.
Not surprisingly, the press love this film. To quote from Ty Burr’s review, “the movie doesn’t turn its journalists into heroes. It just lets them do their jobs, as tedious and critical as those are, with a realism that grips an audience almost in spite of itself.”
