UNITED STATES
The Salt Lake Tribune
By SEAN P. MEANS | The Salt Lake Tribune
If “Spotlight” simply delivered a heroic depiction of working journalists, fighting the good fight against long odds, it would be a great movie.
It also would be a great movie if all it did was detail the levels of official deceit and cover-up that allowed hundreds of Catholic priests in the Boston archdiocese to sexually abuse children over decades. Or if it merely showed how the chumminess of various Boston institutions — the courts, the church, even the newspaper that ultimately exposed the abuse — downplayed the severity of the problem.
The fact that director Tom McCarthy and his co-writer, Josh Singer, do all these things at once, while still telling a rattling good yarn — the sort of war story old-school newspaperpeople tell cub reporters over scotch after deadline — makes it one of the year’s best movies.
“Spotlight” gets its title from The Boston Globe’s team of investigative reporters, called Spotlight. In the summer of 2001, the Spotlight team, led by editor Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton), had just finished a major project and was looking around for the next one. At the same time, the Globe had a new editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), relocated from the Miami Herald and tasked with examining the paper’s shrinking bottom line.
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