MASSACHUSETTS
The Guardian (UK)
[with video]
Peter Bradshaw
@PeterBradshaw1
Thursday 3 September 2015
“If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one,” is how one character here summarises the issues. This high-minded, well-intentioned movie, co-written and directed by Tom McCarthy, is about the Boston Globe’s investigative reporting team Spotlight, and its Pulitzer-winning campaign in 2001 to uncover widespread, systemic child abuse by Catholic priests in Massachusetts.
The film shows that in the close-knit, clubbably loyal and very Catholic city of Boston, no one had any great interest in breaking the queasy, shame-ridden silence that made the church’s culture of abuse possible, and even tentatively suggests that the Globe itself was one of the Boston institutions affected. The paper had evidence of abuse 10 years before the campaign began, but somehow contrived to downplay and bury the story, and it took a new editor, both non-Boston and Jewish, to get things started.
Spotlight has a few inevitable journo cliches: male reporters are dishevelled mavericks who don’t need to keep the same hours as everyone else, doing a fair bit of shouting and desk-thumping. There is much cheeky machismo on the subjects of poker and sports, and they somehow never need to do the boring grind of sitting down and writing stuff on computers. But this is a movie that is honourably concerned to avoid sensationalism and to avoid the bad taste involved in implying that journalists, and not the child abuse survivors, are the really important people here. So there is something cautious, even occasionally plodding, in its dramatic pace.
We keep hearing about how the church is going to come after reporters who dare to challenge its authority – but this never really happens, and there is none of the paranoia of a picture like Alan J Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976) or Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999). Yet McCarthy keeps the narrative motor running, and there are some very good scenes, chiefly the extraordinary moment when Rachel McAdams’s reporter doorsteps a smilingly hospitable retired priest and asks him, flat-out, if he has ever molested a child. The resulting scene had me on the edge of my seat.
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