By James Mottram
“I was raised Catholic,” says writer/director, Tom McCarthy, at The Venice Film Festival. “I wouldn’t consider myself Catholic now though…I’m more of a lapsed Catholic.” He might be lapsed, but McCarthy’s involvement with the Catholic Church has grown exponentially over the last few years, and not exactly in an affirming, spiritually nourishing way. McCarthy’s new film, Spotlight, is the powerful true story of a team of Boston Globe journalists who uncovered one of the biggest cover-ups in modern times. Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Brian D’Arcy James, and Michael Keaton portray the newspaper’s “Spotlight” team, a group of hardened, experienced reporters charged with going deep on major stories, often involving months of complex, rigorous investigations. Emboldened by their new editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), the team tackles the incendiary issue of abuse allegations against the Catholic Church, in one of America’s most Catholic cities. The news that they eventually break is explosive, connecting the highest levels of Boston’s religious, legal, and government institutions in an ugly web of lies, cover-ups, and moral malfeasance. Breaking the story in 2002, the Spotlight team’s efforts had a domino effect, prompting a worldwide discussion about institutional abuse in the Catholic Church.
“I drifted from the church after college,” McCarthy continues, “for a lot of reasons. A lot of it was to do with the institutional behaviour of the church. Spiritually, I still connect with it on some level. It’s part of my heritage and my family, and a lot of my family are very Catholic, and I understand that and respect it. But I had a lot of problems with the institution and the politics. What’s interesting about this new Pope Francis, and he’s a very interesting guy, is that he’s depoliticising the Catholic Church, which is interesting. He’s getting back to what the Church should do, which is focus on the poor and needy and helping people, as opposed to having such a strong political agency. That’s smart.”
Spotlight is a highly reasoned, intelligent, non-exploitative film, and it was never McCarthy’s intention to start any kind of topical brush-fires. But by dint of its subject matter alone – all presented as cold, hard fact – the film is bound to ruffle at least a few feathers, and put a couple of noses out of joint. “We showed the film to a number of Catholics,” McCarthy says. “We did a test screening, and the movie screened very well, even though 46% of the people were Catholic. And a lot of them talked afterwards and said that it was fair. Some said that they didn’t know if they wanted to come to the screening because they knew what it was about, and they didn’t want to sit through something that was church bashing, but it really wasn’t. I have a lot of family and friends that are still connected to the Catholic Church, and the behaviour of the institution is something that they’re still trying to reconcile. It’s in the press every single day now. It’s ongoing, and it will be for a while. This problem has existed for decades, if not centuries. There’s no reason to assume that this started in the fifties and sixties. It’s been going on for a long time, and it’s going to take a long time to clean up.”

Though the blazing nature of its central subject matter gives Spotlight instant cultural traction, the film also works beautifully as a depiction of journalists at work. Playing out almost like a taut police procedural, we see the various reporters tenaciously following leads, poring over documents, and – per the film’s pre-internet proliferation setting – rifling through folders and boxes stuffed with paper to find the answers that they know are in there. We also see them dealing with the damaged victims that the Catholic Church has left in its abusive, internally protected wake. The Spotlight team is obsessed with the job at hand, but they’re individually characterised and finely written. “They are all obsessed, but what’s important is that these are just people who make a living; they have houses, and they have relationships. We didn’t deal a lot with that, but these are just middle class people doing their job and doing it well and working hard. This type of journalism is a calling. They’re incredibly committed to what they do…they’re consumed by it. One of the journalists, Matt Carroll [played by Brian D’Arcy James], told me, ‘My family just gave up on me. I’ve missed games, I’ve missed everything.’ He just got so sucked in by it. The wife of Walter ‘Robby’ Robinson [played by Michael Keaton], who was a nurse, said, ‘I could diagnose all of them with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after this. They were so deep in such a dark story for so long.’ It had a profound effect on them. Robby, who was a real veteran reporter, said that after certain interviews, he would drive home and become very emotional. He said, ‘I reported on wars, and I didn’t get emotional.’ It was brutal because it was so close to home. It was devastating.”