AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
January 20, 2016-
Paul Byrnes
Film critic
SPOTLIGHT ★★★★1/2
(M) General release (129 minutes)
From January 28
At the end of Spotlight, in case you weren’t already angry enough, there is a list of all the places around the world in which major cases of sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy have been uncovered since the Spotlight investigative team did its work in Boston in 2002. There are 105 American cities and 102 from other parts of the world. These include a list of 22 places in Australia, from Adelaide to Wollongong.
That’s hardly a surprise, given that our own Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has produced so much harrowing and damning testimony since 2013 – and it’s not finished yet.
Wisely, the movie is not about child abuse. It’s about how a newspaper, The Boston Globe, had the guts to go after the Catholic Church in a town full of Catholics, knowing that their own heavily Catholic readership would not like it. It’s about the way the Catholic Church, a powerful institution in Boston (as everywhere), tried to conceal the knowledge that almost 250 of its priests were implicated in child sexual abuse – some of them repeatedly, in other dioceses, before they were given new positions supervising children in Boston. And it’s about a depressing question, one that faces every newspaper journalist: could this story still be done now? How many of the world’s great newspapers can still afford to run a unit like Spotlight, the oldest continuous investigative unit in the American media, founded in 1970?
Tom McCarthy (The Station Agent, Win Win) handles this story with restraint and intelligence. This might just be the best newspaper film since All the President’s Men in 1976. The reasons are many, but mainly a sense of proportion, by which I mean the movie doesn’t treat the reporters as bigger than the story. Mark Ruffalo plays the rumpled Mike Rezendes, a terrier, always ready to fight, but he’s no more important than the other reporters. Michael Keaton is the Spotlight team leader, Walter ‘Robby’ Robinson, who plays golf with some of the people he has to go after.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.