“Spotlight” is a must see. To date, this is the best investigative journalism-based movie in existence. Spotlight is a creative nonfiction story about the Boston Globe’s investigation that revealed the darkest secrets of the Boston Catholic Archdiocese and its principal leader, Cardinal Bernard Law.
A scene from Spotlight.
The movie follows a team of four Boston Globe journalists, Spotlight, who primarily covered special interest stories that required extensive investigation. In 2001, incoming editor Marty Barton (Liev Schreiber) tasked the team to follow up on allegations of molestation against a Catholic priest.
Spotlight uncovered the underlying culture of money, law, lies and deceit that allowed Catholic priests to molest children with impunity for many years. Led by Robby Robinson (Michael Keaton), the spotlight team sets out to connect the dots of victims and offenders through in-depth investigation. Although the film does not get caught up in the private lives of the journalists, it does touch upon their personal sacrifices of time, personal security, emotions, family and friends. The movie portrays the team’s real-life situations of creating enemies while conducting research and gathering information for the story.
There are no shootouts, no car chases and no romantic twists. The audience tags along for the investigative process that parallels that of a squad of homicide detectives. The movie reveals what it takes for a momentous journalism story to come together with tenacious individual and team effort. Although the story would achieve Pulitzer Prize status for the team of journalists, it was interesting to see that after the story was released, the team went back to work with a business-as-usual approach.
The writing is Academy Award winning. The movie is packed with stars who do an excellent job of keeping the subject of the movie on track and moving toward revelation. There are few movies that have the dialogue impact of the turning-point conversation between Robinson (Keaton) and lawyer Eric MacLeish (Billy Crudup). The movie is worth seeing just for that exchange.
