Spotlight

Spotlight, American fact-based dramatic film, released in 2015, that won two Academy Awards, including that for best picture. The movie chronicles the efforts of a team of Boston Globe journalists to bring to light the sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests in Boston.

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Spotlight opens with a prologue set in a police station in Boston in 1976 in which a distraught mother is talked out of bringing sexual molestation charges against a priest, Father John Geoghan, and police officers are told not to discuss the incident. The main action begins in early 2001, as The Boston Globe gets a new editor-in-chief, Marty Baron (played by Liev Schreiber). Robby Robinson (Michael Keaton), the head of the newspaper’s Spotlight team—which produces long-form investigative articles that take months to research and develop—meets with Baron. After reading an article in which a lawyer for people who were molested by Geoghan declares that the archbishop, Bernard Cardinal Law, had known for years that Geoghan molested children, Baron instructs Robinson to have the Spotlight unit follow up on the story. Robinson tells his team—Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), and Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James)—about the new assignment. Rezendes meets with the victims’ lawyer, Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci), who is handling 86 cases. The reporters later talk with Phil Saviano (Neal Huff), head of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), who agrees to connect them with some victims and suggests that they talk with Richard Sipe (Richard Jenkins [uncredited]), a former priest who worked at an institution for rehabilitation of pedophile priests. With Sipe’s help, they develop a list of 87 priests who have likely molested children in Boston.

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The team investigates doggedly, meeting with victims, priests, lawyers, and judges, all the while fighting to get documents from previous court settlements unsealed. In spite of attempts by the archdiocese to stop the investigation and fears that the newspaper’s largely Roman Catholic readership will be offended by the story, the team pushes forward. Although they are briefly deflected by the September 11 attacks, they almost immediately afterward learn that some records proving that Law covered up evidence of Geoghan’s pedophilia have been made public and rush back to their original story. The first article from their research is published early in 2002. The expected protest does not materialize; rather, many people call in with more information about pedophile priests. The closing credits say that the cover-ups went beyond Boston all the way to the Vatican and that abuse took place in hundreds of cities and dozens of countries.

Director Tom McCarthy won an Academy Award for his script (co-written with Josh Singer) for the movie, which won praise not only from critics and audiences but also from the staff of The Boston Globe, which commended the film for the accuracy with which it depicted the workings of the newspaper. The series of articles that the real-life Spotlight staff produced won the Globe the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

Production notes and credits

• Studios: Participant Media, First Look Media, Anonymous Content, and Rocklin/Faust
• Director: Tom McCarthy
• Writers: Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer
• Music: Howard Shore

Cast

• Michael Keaton (Robby Robinson)
• Mark Ruffalo (Mike Rezendes)
• Rachel McAdams (Sacha Pfeiffer)
• Brian d’Arcy James (Matt Carroll)
• Liev Schreiber (Marty Baron)
• Stanley Tucci (Mitchell Garabedian)
• Neal Huff (Phil Saviano)

Academy award nominations (* denotes win)

• Picture*
• Supporting actor (Mark Ruffalo)
• Supporting actress (Rachel McAdams)
• Direction
• Editing
• Writing (original screenplay)*