PUZZLED PAGAN PRESENTS

I really love movies that are based on true events, probably because I really love learning about history. Yeah, no movie that’s based or inspired by true events are ever wholly accurate, but they’re still little dramatizations of historical events that can give you gist of something that happened and give you the drive to learn more about the real story. And I think one of the best ways to handle one of these movies is to look at journalists uncovering and reacting to the historical event. I find journalism fascinating, and clearly so does most of Hollywood, because movies about reporters come out at a shocking pace, even though it’s kind of becoming an increasingly archaic profession. Especially newspaper reporters. So yesterday I went to a theater to check out a new movie about a famous piece of journalism, which ended up being pretty apropos for a Sunday.

Spotlight tells story of the Spotlight investigative team that worked for the Boston Globe in 2001 and was one of the first stories to uncover the institutional sex abuse in the Catholic church. Sounds like a fun and light topic, right?! Obviously not, which I realized is kind of a first for this site. I haven’t talked about a hardcore, straight drama yet. And it’s going to be hard. There’s nothing funny to talk about in this movie, and nor should there be. There are a couple jokes throughout the movie that serves to keep it from being just a draining kick to the soul, but it’s done with the appropriate amount of seriousness. This was an excellent film, expertly acted, that gets to the heart of truly horrible story. I’m not going to write this like a normal article, explaining the plot and making observations, because really, when I got down to it, the plot is incredibly simple. It just follows a group of reporters doing everything they can to learn the truth about what these priests are doing, and who all is covering up for it.

The story begins when a new editor for the Boston Globe shows up and starts looking at Boston from an outsiders perspective. He finds that no one is thinking much about a local lawyer who is trying to sue the Catholic church for the family of a boy who claims to have been molested by a priest. And this little thought drops the Spotlight team down the rabbit hole of insanity that is the sexual abuse scandal of Boston. They start to uncover years, decades of hidden abuse that was not only covered up by the church, which is believable, but by the city itself. They start to realize that just about everyone in Boston seemed to know that there was abuse, either by being the victim or someone complaisant in it. And holy crap is it depressing.

Now, I’m 26 years old and this story broke in early 2002, after the fervor of 9/11 new died down a bit. And I remember how shocked the world was when all of this started coming out. People were stunned, although if the statistics that are presented in the movie are accurate, we shouldn’t have been. One of the most interesting aspects of the movie to me was when they uncover a guy who was a psychologist former Catholic priest that had been studying and working with the pedophile priests when they would get caught. Apparently when priests were caught they had to pop over to different “treatment centers” where they laid low for a while then got shuffled off to a new church where the cycle would start over again. But the psychologist informs them that his research found that roughly 6% of priests have been involved in at least one pedophilia event. Which ends up being true for these characters, and they end up finding 87 priests that were active in Boston that were involved in the scandal. Which is just disgusting.

Around halfway through the movie, the lawyer played by Stanley Tucci says something that really summed up the movie for me. I don’t know if I got the quote exactly right, but it was something along the lines of “they say it takes a village to raise a child, well it also take a village to molest one.” And that really showed to be true. The movie pointed out that it wasn’t just the priests who were guilty, there were dozens of people that were also keeping everything hush-hush. Families were told to be quiet about the abuse not just from the church, but from neighbors and friends. The Church was shown to essentially be the Mafia in Boston, an omnipresent force that was ruling the city from the shadows. Hell, just about every shot of the city had at least one cathedral in the background somewhere. They’re apparently everywhere, just a massive force. And could you imagine that if you were a victim? You were already abused by someone you were taught to admire and respect, that abuse was ignored by everyone including your parents, and you spend the rest of your life in this city, surrounded by cathedrals that serve as a constant reminder of the abuse. Good god.

The movie was terrific, and I highly recommend it to anyone who thinks they can stomach the incredible sense of injustice and anger that it should create in you. Because even though they get the story out, it had a pretty bleak ending, at least to me. When the story breaks, they put the phone number of the Spotlight department for people to come forward with more tips, but they also expect people to picket the building and flood the main line with hate calls. But when they get to the office the next day, there aren’t protesters, and the main line is dead. Yet the Spotlight department is being attacked by phone calls of people who had been abused. Which to me, was incredibly depressing. They had a whole bunch of new cases of abuse, and the public at large just didn’t care enough to call them. We then get a lovely bunch of text come up on the screen letting us know that pretty much everyone involved got away with it and then we got like five screens full of cities that have had priest sex abuse scandals uncovered since the report. Which is really what made me the most sad. Child abuse scandals by the clergy has become one of those terrible things that just kind of became white noise in the news. Since I’ve been aware of current events things like terrorist attacks, school shootings, and sex scandals have just been something that happen in the world. Which is horrific. We’ve become complacent to things like this, which made this one of the most depressing movies I’ve ever seen. We see the wonderful cast succeed in getting the story out, to educate the people about this horrible thing lurking below society. And yet, in 2015 I really don’t think anything has changed. We haven’t dealt with the problems, we’ve just started accepting that it’s a part of life.

Sorry to be such a downer, but this was a really wonderfully dark and thought-provoking film. I loved it, and everyone should see it, even though it kind of put me in a funk that will be hard to get out of. Back to silly comic books and Simpsons tomorrow.

Spotlight was written by Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer, directed by Tom McCarthy, and released by Open Road Films, 2015.