Pre-COVID, I went to the movies every weekend, but I didn’t always. I can’t pinpoint exactly when I started, but I know it was after my separation and subsequent divorce. If I could point to a time when it might have come closest to starting, I might say it was when I took a trip to Austin to see friends. I had never been to Austin and needed something do because, well, my friends had jobs and family obligations, and I couldn’t exactly expect them to just entertain me for the few days I was in town. I don’t drink. I could take or leave live music thanks to my tinnitus. What could I do? The Alamo Drafthouse movie theaters, and I went four times to see three movies: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens twice, The Big Short, and finally Spotlight. A bit later, Spotlight won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and I was a little surprised.
Oh, not because it was a bad film or anything. But compared to some of the other nominees–The Big Short comes to mind–it wasn’t a flashy sort of film. It was a very low key, well-done film telling an important story, but not in the sort of way that would make it stand out as much as how The Big Short, or The Martian, or even Mad Max: Fury Road did. So, how did it end up on the Stacker list?
That’s not necessarily a bad question. The Stacker list isn’t made up entirely of recent films, but there are a lot of them. Heck the next film in the countdown is another recent Best Picture nominee. I chalk much of that up to how the Stacker list was put together, with one of the two sources being IMDB. My general concern for user-based lists is that, well, they tend to go for the more recent and less for the timely or the obscure. I get why too. Most people aren’t film buffs who go out of their way to watch old films, especially ones that weren’t filmed in English. Any sort of list made up by most people would probably include a lot of popular, recent films, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Heck, I’ll go so far as to say that the films on the Stacker list that I recognize that are rather recent are also rather good. That includes Spotlight, a very non-flashy film about some reporters uncovering child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
However, I am coming to this one after just finishing Chinatown, yet another film about people in power abusing the weak and defenseless and maybe getting away with it. Neither Chinatown nor Spotlight ends with the obvious villains being led away in handcuffs. Both are assisted in their own ways by the local hierarchy, the police in the case of Chinatown‘s Noah Cross and the Catholic Church in the case of Spotlight‘s Cardinal Law. The big difference is at no point do the reporters working for the Boston Globe‘s Spotlight investigative reporting branch ever really confront Law in any sort of direct way. Law (Len Cariou) is basically a background character. He has lines, but he’s more of an omnipresent force within the city of Boston, so much so that it seems pretty much everyone is aware of what Law is doing on some level, namely moving priests accused of sexual abuse of minors around to different parishes rather than turn them over to law enforcement or something along those lines. The Church settles out of court for a pittance, and often in a way where no one involved can say anything about it afterwards due to the nature of the settlements if anything is settled at all.
Instead, the film basically shows that, at least in Boston, the Catholic Church is effectively everywhere. As the reporters go out and interview former victims, there is at least one shot of a large church looming in the background. Law doesn’t have to appear in the film all that much, and none of the reporters or editors have to get into an argument or even shout accusations at him. He’s not that kind of villain. He’s the sort that people seem to approve of more than they disapprove of. As Stanley Tucci’s lawyer character Mitchell Garabedian points out early on, it takes an outsider to notice. Garabedian was never Catholic while the newspaper’s new managing editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) just moved to Boston, a fact many of Law’s supporters use as evidence that he’ll just move on to another paper, so why not just forget the whole thing? In point of fact, all four members of the Spotlight team, editor Robby Robinson (Michael Keaton) and reporters Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), and Matt Carroll (Brian D’Arcy James) are all Boston natives and lapsed Catholics, where the only one who still attends Mass at all is Sacha when she takes her grandmother to services.
But the film then rolls on, with first the suspicion that there’s one bad priest, and from there, the numbers just increase. When the Spotlight team thinks they have a good grasp on the number at 13, even they are horrified to learn, when talking to an expert, that the number should be closer to 90. Matt learns that a block from his own home is a “treatment center” for some of these disgraced priests, and all he can do is post a message on the refrigerator telling his own kids to stay away from the place because he shouldn’t even tell his neighbors what’s going on until the team finishes their story with all the required proof to prevent the Church from once again wiggling away from whatever accusations are made. It even gets to the point that Robinson has to admit that he himself once somewhat covered up for the Church when he was an editor for another part of the newspaper, running a quick story about the accusations but never following up on something that potentially huge until years later when Baron basically tells the Spotlight team to look into the allegations.
And on a side note…I totally get that. Like the main characters in the film, I am myself a lapsed Catholic, and while I have no real desire to go back to the Church, that doesn’t mean it isn’t hard to see that allegations like this aren’t just someone attacking the Church for one reason or another other than the obvious one, namely that these priests are truly taking advantage of their position to get away with awful crimes against the innocent and trusting. I spent 12 years in Catholic school, spent time with many priests, and never had an encounter, nor to the best of my knowledge did anyone I know. True, this isn’t the sort of thing people brag about, but there was a period when I was not attending church services and was still a bit sensitive to jokes and the like about Catholic priests touching children. I don’t doubt there were many who did, but the idea that all of them do bothered me. Heck, even Spotlight pegs the number at 6%, but the problem there is, any number above zero is too high, and the Church hierarchy is far more complicit in what happened than they would even today like to admit.
That in and of itself may be why Spotlight works the way it does. The reporters and editors do their jobs, and none of the actors give anything other than a very matter-of-fact performance aside from maybe Ruffalo as the office hothead, and even then, it’s more like he loses his temper maybe twice in the course of the film. There’s very little shouting, sanctimonious speeches, or swelling music as priests are led away in handcuffs. Instead, it’s just a group of journalists doing their jobs in a methodical manner, where the only run-ins they have with Church officials are basically lawyers and the occasional booster who would like the team to back off because of all the good Cardinal Law does for the city.
That said, in the end, what did the Spotlight team accomplish? Did they get Law or any of those priests tossed into prison? From the looks of things, no. The story was told. It’s public knowledge. And then what? The film ends with a list of places that have had similar scandals. Is there an answer to that? I would say no. Not so long as priests are treated as if they have some level of legal immunity from the things that they do that hurt others. And like with Chinatown, it doesn’t help when the blatantly guilty don’t even have the decency to realize just how much pain they’ve caused by either abusing children or sheltering those who did.
NEXT: Well, that’s depressing. How about a nice musical? Be back soon for 2016’s La-La Land, the film that finally made me see how to appreciate the musical.
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