Spotlight
Crit
Damn, I love newspapers, admire then, need them, premourn their inevitable demise. I'm even proud to have spent a third of my working life in newspapers, even though I was always in sports and never did anything braver than deleting a coach's homophobic locker room joke from the executive sports editor's column. But I rubbed shoulders and, after hours, bent elbows with reporters who did more important stuff. (What, you didn't think I was going to write about newspapers without mentioning alcohol, did you?)
Mainly I love it when big (almost always American) newspapers expose the shit that sanctimony and hypocrisy and corruption sink their roots into. And I love movies about those investigations, especially ones that find romance in the drudgery that constitutes 99.9% of good investigative newspaper work.
I don't even need to name the picture that does this best, having reviewed it here with some regularity over the years, but this new one, notwithstanding its bleh title (seriously, in the '70s, when the Globe was putting together a team for special investigative projects, Spotlight was the most appealing name they could come up with?), is a worthy entry in the field.
Never mind the angrymaking reprise of the Boston Globe's investigation into systemic protection and recycling of predatory priests by the Archdiocese of Boston and the Catholic Church more broadly; maybe the most remarkable accomplishment here is conjuring a world where the church still had enough clout--with police, with judges, with politicians, with plutocrats--to stonewall its sins for so long. A church with that kind of power seems a joke now, and it's worth remembering that this story was breaking--against that still powerful resistance--less than 15 years ago.
But ask yourself this question, which writer-director Tom McCarthy, to his credit, does not press: had the Globe not pursued the story, would the church have made an effort to clean its house, or would it have continued reshuffling its pedophiles, monkey business as usual? And if the shit had not hit the fan so messily, would people be talking today about recent and ongoing changes in the character of the papacy, and of the church itself?
The story was pursued as newspapers used to pursue stories, and as all media outlets find it increasingly impossible to do in the era of the 24-hour news cycle: carefully, in depth, without haste, leaving no loose thread that the subjects might use to unravel the whole thing. And damned if it didn't make the world a better place.
Trailers
- Triple 9--Cops, robbers, and cops who are robbers.
- Snowden--The Oliver Stone treatment.
2 comments:
I saw this movie last night and to answer your question, no, the church would not have made an effort to clean house if the Globe story had not come out, and yes, they would have continued reshuffling its pedophiles. I actually think there is still reshuffling going on but to a lesser extent. At least I hope it is to a lesser extent. —Roberta
In the immediate aftermath, I think this is as good as President's Men.
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