Movie scene from "Spotlight." © Kerry Hayes
Director Tom McCarthy (l.) and Josh Singer with the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay for "Spotlight" © Paul Buck
Sexual abuse by priests, which is also covered up, not only by church superiors. The film "Spotlight" sheds light on this scandalous topic. Moving, brilliantly acted – and winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture.
No genre is currently as popular with moviegoers as films based on true events. Dealing with the abuse cases by Catholic priests and their widespread publicity was a natural choice under such circumstances.
Best film and best director
In "Spotlight," however, director Tom McCarthy tackles the subject not out of sensationalism and a lust for scandal, but more like a scientist. How someone who is not satisfied with the generally available investigation because they feel so stirred by what happened that they want to reveal the full extent and the whole truth. For this sensitive work, McCarthy received the Oscar for best original screenplay on Monday morning German time – and his work was awarded best film.
"Spotlight" is reminiscent of one of the great role models in film history, Alan J. Pakula's 1976 "The Incorruptibles," which is about the uncovering of the Watergate scandal by two "Washington Post" journalists. McCarthy's film is also a newspaper drama, journalistic investigation and detective story all in one. And "Spotlight," like "The Incorruptibles," is a serious film that, at most, could be faulted for treating the deep and continuing suffering of victims too much in passing.
Plot revolves around investigative work by a newspaper newsroom
Much of the action takes place in the editorial offices of the "Boston Globe" and revolves around the investigative work of a team from the newspaper, which was later awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its reports. It is not swept under the table that the reporters of the "Boston Globe" also knew about the events many years before. For co-responsibility for the cover-up of the abuse cases was not only borne by the perpetrators themselves and responsible persons at the management level of the Archdiocese of Boston up to Cardinal Bernard F. Law.
Here and there details had been leaked to the public, but all those who had knowledge of them practiced a culture of looking the other way and keeping quiet for the sake of the bigger picture. Even on the floors of the Boston Globe, it took a new editorial director from Miami to view the Catholic establishment, which permeated all of the city's institutions, with sober skepticism that called for journalistic activity. This allowed a small team of journalists to begin the seemingly hopeless task of bringing to light files kept under lock and key and long-neglected evidence.
Complicity of churchmen, lawyers and newspapermen exposed
The film excels most in those passages that reveal the complicity of churchmen, lawyers and newspapermen to whom the fatal silence of the preceding years was owed. The reporters themselves also come from the environment of the most Catholic megacity in the USA. And even they are not free of scruples, but they are convinced that they have an enlightenment work to do, which is more important than consideration of their upbringing and origin.
McCarthy tells the story of the painstaking, gradual untangling of a web of denial and cover-up in mostly calm, matter-of-fact and emphatically unspectacular scenes. He does it with the same sensitivity that already distinguished his film "A Summer in New York – The Visitor". He urges his actors to make restrained gestures. This makes "Spotlight" credible and moves the detailed reconstruction of the still highly sensitive events close to a documentary film.
Abuse victims only marginal figures
Director McCarthy, however, does not shy away from stating the facts that have come to light. For example, the fact that the accused priests are not just a few "bad apples," but a long list of names that eventually led the cardinal to resign. The last word on the Boston church scandal, however, is not a film like "Spotlight". Too one-sided in its focus on reporters and investigative journalism rather than abuse victims, who are more marginal figures. They deserve their own movie.