"Spotlight"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I didn't know it last Friday night, but I was about to leave the next morning to spend the weekend in San Francisco. 

Probably it will sound ungrateful to my plotting spouse, and an insult to the city of San Francisco, but I think I had the best time watching a movie in the hotel room Saturday night.  We had thought about going to a midnight showing of Purple Rain at a theatre in the Castro--Prince had a following in that neighborhood--but, being unsure of public transportation in the middle of the night, not to mention the possible impact on biological clocks running on Central Time, we instead shared a pizza at a happening bar on the edge of Chinatown before walking back to the hotel and ordering up Spotlight.

I think the last movie I saw was Inside Out, and the last one before that was Big Hero Six, and the last one I begged out of was The Good Dinosaur.  So maybe I was just set up for an adult movie.  Spotlight, the story of the Boston Globe's investigation of the coddling of sexual predators in clerical collars by the Boston Archdiocese, headed by Cardinal Law, is clearly for adults.  It won the Best Picture Oscar, and perhaps for that reason I was expecting the traditional Hollywood lineup, the Good Guys (in this instance, journalists) on one side, the Bad Guys (in this instance, Cardinal Law and his Church) on the other, with the Good Guys suffering some setbacks before sending the crowd home happy with a satisfying, late-inning rally.  It's nothing like that, however.  The last scene, one of the most powerful I remember seeing in any movie, is a decent summary.  The reporters have finally gotten to the point where they can run the story, and there is the predictable scene of the presses running the night before the big issue is going to be delivered to all the subscribers in Boston, home to a million Irish Catholics.  But by this time the reporters have uncovered more than just the criminal complicity of the Church.  There are, for example, nicely dressed lawyers who, "representing" the victims of  priests, have made a lucrative cottage industry out of arranging off-the-record, five-figure settlements with the Church.  They weren't rooting out evil, they were just cashing checks.  The guilt of one of these fellows is mitigated somewhat by the fact that years ago he had fed the Globe information about the Church's criminality.  There had been one article, no follow up, and it now develops that it was the leader of the Spotlight investigation, played by Michael Keaton, who had squashed the story back in his days in the Metro section.  In that last scene, he walks into the newsroom right after the story has been published.  Phones are ringing off the hook, more victims who think they now will be heard.  In what might have been, in a different movie, his moment of triumph, he looks disconsolate, defeated.  He knows that years ago he failed all the people on the other end of all those ringing phones. He hadn't had the stomach for a fight with the Catholic Church in Boston.