UNITED STATES
Charlotte Observer
BY LAWRENCE TOPPMAN
ltoppman@charlotteobserver.com
Philosopher John Stuart Mill said, “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing.” The truth of that can be found in “Spotlight.”
Director Tom McCarthy, who wrote the script with Josh Singer, has made a film without heroes. This dramatization of the Boston Globe’s exposure of pedophile priests in 2002 – and the complicity of church officials as high as Cardinal Bernard Law – exposes a chain of failures that let depravity go on for decades.
Police refused to take abuse cases seriously. Prosecutors chose not to arraign culprits. Lawyers made a cottage industry of hushing up crimes, arranging settlements for victims in exchange for silence. The cardinal and his employees ignored parishioners’ complaints or moved priests to churches where no one knew them, so abuse continued. And the Globe, alerted more than once, failed to grasp the scope of the story or commit resources to uncovering it.
“Spotlight” depicts Boston at the turn of the 21st century as a huge and mostly homogenous village, where more than half the citizens are Catholic. The church has vast influence, which it often uses to do benevolent things. Only with the arrival of an outsider, Jewish editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), does the Globe begin to push for the truth.
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