Sins of the fathers

Probably one of the key scenes in Tom McCarthy’s film Spotlight, which examines how the Boston Globe newspaper broke a 2003 story about Catholic priests sexually abusing boys and how the Church hushed it up, occurs on the doorstep of one such priest. Investigative reporter Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) is asking this retired priest — a gentle, kindly old man — about any incidents of sexual abuse. And he happily supplies information. “You have to understand, I took no pleasure from touching them,” the priest says, before his sister arrives to shut him up. “Just as those priests who touched me took no pleasure.” This, in a nutshell, reveals the nasty cycle that allowed many Catholic priests to go from being abused boys, to abusing boys, without feeling like they’d even sinned.

While the Church now feels as though it’s come clean on this very difficult issue, Spotlight (which comes out this Wednesday through Solar Entertainment) opens up the file once again, and explains how the system allowed it to happen, again and again. What it shows viewers is not a pretty picture. Graphic details of priestly abuse are not sugarcoated, and we are shocked to hear them.

Starring McAdams, Mark Ruffalo (both Oscar-nominated here) and Michael Keaton, the film opens with the arrival of temporary managing editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) to the Globe offices. The Miami-based editor, a Jew amid a sea of Irish Catholics, smells a cover-up behind a lawsuit facing several priests. He asks the paper’s investigative team, led by Walter “Robby” Robinson (Keaton), to dig deeper for their monthly “Insight” exposé series.

What comes out is a procedural drama of fact-gathering that’s no less gripping and striking in detail than Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men. (Call it “All the Cardinal’s Men”) and no less regime-toppling.

Spotlight explores the most painful chapter in the Catholic Church’s history (and there have been some doozies in the past), but more than this, it teaches us a lot about how journalism works, and how stories get told (or in many cases, don’t get told).

What is revealed in McCarthy’s unraveling tale of abuse is a conspiracy of silence that goes all the way up to Boston’s Cardinal Law (and beyond, it turns out). The Globe received Pulitzers for their coverage, and their findings opened the floodgates for thousands of other abuse victims to come forward across the US, and across the world.

Michael Keaton and Rachel McAdams discuss how deep they can dig into a cover-up of priest abuse cases.

As much as the subject will anger viewers, the film mostly keeps a cool head, lining up interviewees, tracking down documents, looking for inside confirmation from within the Church’s legal environs. Drama-wise, there are no car chases or big courtroom scenes. Just a bunch of white men and women sitting around in offices with rolled-up shirtsleeves, quietly discussing when to publish.

The film’s loudest voice of disgust — and few actors register moral disgust as viscerally on camera — comes from Ruffalo, playing reporter Michael Rezendez. His “Oscar moment” occurs in the Globe office where he launches into a spit-fueled tirade against the cover-up and the newspaper’s hedging on whether to run the story.

What’s especially troubling about Spotlight is what it shows us about sexual abuse in general. While it’s hard enough for ordinary victims to speak out against family members, it’s even harder for these Catholics — most of them from poor and working-class families where the Church played a key role in values formation, and for whom a visit from a local parish priest was “close to meeting God.” All the more reason these victims wouldn’t come forward.

The Church is visually rendered as a dominating, intimidating presence in Spotlight: you see church steeples looming in the background of almost every scene where the Globe reporters take to the neighborhoods to conduct interviews.

Likable despite his flaws is chief editor Robinson, who at first treads carefully, knowing how many lawsuits will likely ensue, not to mention death threats from angry Catholics. Keaton is best when playing a guy who’s in charge, yet morally conflicted. He continues his Birdman streak here.

Both McAdams and Ruffalo do solid work here, but also of note is John Slattery (managing editor Ben Bradlee Jr.; also Roger from Mad Men), Stanley Tucci as paranoid lawyer Mitchell Garabedian who helps “unseal” sealed Church documents, and Billy Crudup as a sleazy lawyer who facilitates dozens of financial settlements with abuse victims before the stories can ever break.

You get a sense of the mechanics of old-fashioned journalism in Spotlight that we haven’t seen since Redford and Hoffman hit the streets (and parking lots) to unmask Nixon. One interesting aspect is how 9/11 coverage practically buries the ongoing “Spotlight” investigation. As dozens of reporters are reassigned around the country to track down 9/11 leads, the priest abuse story comes to a dead halt — because in the real world, actual reporters have to gather facts, interview nervous witnesses, sift through records, and find that crucial break that will make a story rock-solid. And they can’t do two big stories at once. It’s not as easy as “Googling it,” no matter what millennials would have us believe. Someone has to actually do the fact-gathering. And Spotlight shows us how that’s done. They’re so good, you almost wish this investigative team could nail down a few scandal stories in the Philippines.