“Spotlight” is a film that definitely earned its best picture award in 2015. It is based on the Boston Globe’s investigation of the Catholic priest child-abuse scandal in 2002. It manages to both feel rooted in the early 2000s and also feel very timely now. It straddles the line between illustrating the pain that the abuse victims felt without turning it into shock value.
In 2002, when many people first heard about the investigations, it stunned the nation. No one knew anything about the treatment centers or how the priests would just be moved from parish to parish.
In the film “Spotlight,” all members of the investigative team had their own crises of faith (they were all lapsed Catholics), but you could argue that that made them stronger. By giving up their trust in the Catholic Church, they could see what lay beneath the lies. Their rage at that truth made them work harder, go after every lead and aim to tell the story as truthfully as they could.
Walter “Robby” Robbinson had to give up his friendship with the Catholic Church, and more specifically those connected to it. In return for writing this story, Robby gained a stronger understanding of how worthwhile stories can be swept under the rug unintentionally. But he also saw that these stories could be recovered and shown to the world despite setbacks.
Sacha Pfeiffer had to give up going to church with her devout grandmother and also accept the fact that this story would hurt her grandmother deeply. Despite that, she gained knowledge of the ways that the Church and law can fail child sexual abuse survivors and realized that this was something her grandmother had to understand.
Mike Rezendes had to give up his marriage and became even more of a workaholic than before. On the spiritual side, he had to give up the possibility of going back to Catholicism–this scandal made it clear that he couldn’t do that with the knowledge he’d learned. Despite the toll it took on Mike, he gained patience: no matter how hard the truth is to be heard, it needs to be tight, with no loose ends.
Matt Carroll had to give up trusting his neighbors. As a parent, the mounting evidence of pedophilia hits him the hardest: he even finds out there’s a treatment center a block away from his home. His gain is harder to spot—you could say that he learned how to protect his children without making them paranoid. Smaller-scale than the others’, yes, but it’s still valuable.
Together, the Spotlight team members learned to research a story thoroughly, even more so than usual. They learned to be patient when it came to the right time to publish and that truths deserve to be told, no matter how painful or how long it’s been since the problem started.
A promo piece for “Spotlight” was a tough hurdle to clear: this is a film about systemic child abuse in recent memory. People are going to be very emotionally raw when it comes to that. The film itself avoids cheap shock by focusing on the abuse survivors describing what happened, not showing it in flashbacks. With that in mind, it’d be good to try to focus on the film’s strengths: how it shows investigative reporting, all the trials Spotlight has to go through, how the survivors react to Spotlight and how both want justice served.
Another important detail to notice is how “Spotlight” treats Boston, showing how the city is the characters’ home alongside the corrupt system that lives in it. That’s important: what made Spotlight’s investigation so shocking was that the Church, something beautiful and trustworthy, wasn’t doing anything to stop children from being hurt. It’s hypocrisy at its peak, yet the Church itself saw nothing wrong with it. That’s what the film brings to light: a battle between institutions meant to help people.
