#SPOTLIFE MOVIE MOVIE#

#SPOTLIFE MOVIE MOVIE#

The movie celebrates a specific professional accomplishment and beautifully captures the professional ethos of journalism. To use “Spotlight” as an occasion to wax nostalgic for the vanishing glory of print would be to miss the point. “What took you so long?” is a question they hear more than once. At the same time, they are atoning for previous lapses and trying to overcome the bureaucratic inertia that is as integral to the functioning of a newspaper as the zealous pursuit of the truth. The Spotlight reporters and editors are pursuing a big, potentially career-making scoop. Before 2001 - with some exceptions, notably in the work of the columnist Eileen McNamara (played here in a few cursory scenes by Maureen Keiller) - the paper overlooked both the extent of the criminality in the local church and the evidence that the hierarchy knew what was going on. The people who work inside it are decidedly fallible - as prone to laziness, confusion and compromise as anyone else. The Globe itself (owned by The New York Times Company when the film takes place) is shown to be an imperfect institution. As the number of victims and predators increases, and as it becomes clear that Law and others knew what was happening and protected the guilty, shock and indignation are replaced by a deeper sense of moral horror. Baron urges the reporters to focus on the systemic dimensions of the story, and “Spotlight” does the same. Though the film, like the Spotlight articles, avoids euphemism in discussing the facts of child rape, it also avoids exploitative flashbacks, balancing attention to individual cases with a sense of pervasive, invisible corruption. He follows Pfeiffer as she interviews survivors, Rezendes as he wrangles a zealous lawyer (Stanley Tucci) and Carroll as he digs into long-hidden records, including articles buried in the newspaper’s archives. McCarthy, who played a rotten reporter on the last season of “The Wire,” views journalists primarily through the lens of their work.

The reporters working for Robby - Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) and Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James) - come from Catholic backgrounds, and have their own mixed feelings about what they’re doing. guy (Paul Guilfoyle) and plays golf with a well-connected lawyer (Jamey Sheridan) who handled some of the archdiocese’s unsavory business. He rubs shoulders with an unctuous church P.R. Their supervising editor, Walter Robinson (known as Robby and played by an extra-flinty Michael Keaton), has a classically blunt, skeptical newsman style, but he’s also part of Boston’s mostly Roman Catholic establishment. We spend most of our time with the Spotlight staff.

Spotlife movie