Like The Revenant and The Big Short, Spotlight is yet another Oscar contender ‘based on true events’ — although it has now been suggested that The Revenant was 99.7 per cent made up. (Does this matter? Only, I suppose, in the sense that you should know what you’re watching.) But we’re on firm ground with Spotlight, where the events — the Boston Globe’s uncovering of systemic child abuse by Catholic priests in Massachusetts — are a matter of record, although how you make a film about something so awful, I don’t know.
Personally, I wanted the film to give it to the Church with both barrels, and let rip with fury, but it’s too restrained for that. Instead, what we have is conscientiously dogged, as well as somewhat repetitive, driving the same points home over and over. Indeed, if I’d had £1 for every time the script employed the phrase ‘But this is the Church we’re talking about!’, it would have been an odd way to make money, but I’d have come away quite well off all the same.
Directed by Tom McCarthy (The Station Agent, The Visitor), who also co-wrote the script with Josh Singer (The Fifth Estate), the film is set in 2002, in Boston, a city which, you quickly gather, is so Catholic — ‘But this is the Church we’re talking about! — that no one wants to acknowledge what is happening right under their noses, and this includes the Globe. (Think BBC at the time of Savile, and that’s where it was at, more or less.) The Globe had evidence of abuse going back many years, but either buried stories or failed to act on leads, and that was its modus operandi until the arrival of a new editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber).
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