Spotlight

Capsule Film Review #10

This is the tenth in a series of short pieces (max. 250 words) about films. They appear in addition to my regular essays.

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One: the abuse did not take place. Two: it took place, but the clergy were unaware of it. Three: they were aware of it, but reasonably followed the professional advice they were given in dealing with it. Four: they wilfully ignored some advice, but what happened was no different from what would be expected for any organisation of that size. Five: what happened was different from any… are you starting to notice a pattern?

The fact that nowadays very few people take this relay of excuses seriously has a lot to do with the efforts of investigative journalists, and the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe perhaps above all others.

Spotlight (2015, d. Tom McCarthy) is a film about those journalists: it shows how righteous and how boring their job can be without ever itself being boring or self-righteous. It does not idealise them like All the President’s Men or The Post; it does not tell you that they are important, but shows you—a significant message in the age of Buzzfeed and Truth Social.

At the same time, it is a film about the crimes: the victims, the corrupt world (‘if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one’), the men—like the inaptly named Cardinal Law, whose punishment was to spend his remaining days as archpriest at Santa Maria Maggiore—who let it happen. The perpetrators, on the other hand, don’t get a look in. Too right.

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