UNITED STATES
Citizen-Times
Bruce C Steele, bsteele@citizen-times.com November 19, 2015
The real stars of the fact-based movie “Spotlight” are the no-name actors who portray the survivors of childhood sexual abuse by Catholic priests. The familiar faces playing the Boston Globe investigative team — Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams — do great work, yet you can’t entirely forget they’re actors.
But the journalists’ brief interviews with the damaged adults finally able to tell their stories — especially Michael Cyril Creighton as a gay man named Joe — put human, vulnerable faces on the atrocities covered up by the church across the world for decades. In those moments it’s not just a story. It’s a open wound at last given a chance to heal.
“Spotlight” may be the best movie about newspaper reporters since “The Killing Fields” or even “All the President’s Men,” a movie with which it has a lot in common, including a real-life editor named Ben Bradlee (John Slattery), here the son of the Washington Post editor. Mike (Rufallo) and Sacha (McAdams) are the Woodward and Bernstein, assisted by fellow reporter Matt (Brian d’Arcy James) and by Robby (Keaton), the leader of their investigative team, called Spotlight.
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