Review of Spotlight (2015) by Axgrinder — 28 Nov 2015

Warning! Professional reviewers are gushing over Spotlight. This is often a “tell” that a movie isn’t very appealing to large swaths of the general movie-going public, and such is the case here. Despite a good cast, decent acting and intelligent dialogue, the movie is just plain boring.

Spotlight explains how a small team of investigative reporters at a “local” newspaper (The Boston Globe) uncovered, and eventually reported on, Catholic Priests molesting children in the Boston area. If you’ve read a newspaper in the last 10 years you already know the basic story: Church hierarchy was not only aware of the problem, but had been covering it up for decades. The breaking of the story led to subsequent revelations that the abuse inflicted by these Catholic priests on their parishioners wasn’t an isolated incident limited to the Boston area. It’s a world-wide plague.

It’s almost impossible to be oppugnant of a movie whose subject matter is so poignant. The problem is that Spotlight just isn’t that interesting, unless you are Catholic, a newspaper writer, or from the Boston area. Most of us would expect a movie about such atrocities to answer the basic question, who is responsible? We might also expect a movie in which Good ultimately triumphs over Evil, and the Bad are brought to justice. Spotlight painstakingly avoids the later and the typical Hollywood happy ending.

Instead, the movie is an introspection which attempts to focus on identifying how something so disgusting and so widespread could have gone on for so long. The movie answers this question in an unexpected manner that is the ultimate indictment of Catholic orthodoxy, which seeks to imbue the faithful with a belief that the church is both inherently good and infallible in its decision making (and thus is not to be questioned) and that man, who is born sinful, should feel guilty about everything that he does (or in this case, doesn’t do).

The only real tension in the movie comes when the audience learns that information about priests molesting children was previously sent to the newspaper many years ago, but the newspaper failed to act on it, and that someone may have deliberately buried it. We continually wait for this play out, only to discover in highly anticlimactic fashion that the inaction was probably inadvertent (or maybe subconsciously suppressed and ignored).

We are left with the idea that the catholic community of Boston (which is portrayed as a fiercely prideful and tightknit community) knew or should have known what was going on for all those years and thus, the community bears significant responsible for the decades of delay in stopping the abuse.

While I appreciate the irony that a Catholic community is made up of individuals who, as a result of church teachings, are permeated with a sense of guilt, and thus might blame themselves for not outing their own child molesting priests on a more-timely basis, I didn’t view this movie as involving some grand revelation, I saw it more as a movie about mental self-flagellation.