Film Review: ‘Spotlight’ Offers a Relevant First Draft to History

Submitted by PatrickMcD on November 16, 2015 - 6:01pm

CHICAGO – “Spotlight” is a movie which aspires to greatness and oftentimes just about gets there. It’s a movie that is thoroughly confident that the process of journalism and a great story provides all the excitement it needs to grab an audience’s attention. And what a great story it is.

Rating: 4.0/5.0

“Spotlight” centers on the Boston Globe’s pulitzer prize winning investigation that uncovered the priest abuse sex scandal in the Catholic Church in Boston. It’s populated by a top flight cast led by Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, John Slattery, Rachel McAdams, Stanley Tucci and Liev Schreiber. While Hollywood dramatizations of real events always have a risk of being too pat or patronizing, since the audience presumably already knows the ending, this film digs deep into the seeds of doubt and hand wringing involved in coming to such a conclusion.

The film starts small with a suggestion from an unlikely source, the newly installed editor of the Boston Globe (Liev Schreiber). He’s an out of towner who doesn’t know Boston from Baltimore, and arrived just off the plane from Florida. On literally his first day on the job, he tells the investigative unit to look into an old case involving an allegedly abusive priest which had been featured by one of the paper’s columnists. There are legions of dismissals from the newsroom staff because the lawyer representing the priests victims is a crackpot, and another lawyer is a media hog, and so on and so forth. But they decide to dig in and see what they find.

”Spotlight” opens in select theaters throughout November of 2015. Check local listings for theaters and show times. Featuring Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Stanley Tucci, Liev Schreiber, John Slattery and Stanley Tucci. Screenplay by Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer. Directed by Tom McCartney. Rated “R”