Spotlight is a 2015 American biographical drama film directed by Tom McCarthy and written by McCarthy and Josh Singer. The film follows The Boston Globe's "Spotlight" team, the oldest continuously operating newspaper investigative unit in the United States and its investigation into the widespread child sex abuse cases in the Boston area. It is based on a series of stories by the real Spotlight Team that earned The Globe the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. The film stars Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, Brian d'Arcy James, Liev Schreiber, and Billy Crudup.
Spotlight was shown in the Out of Competition section of the 72nd Venice International Film Festival. It was shown as well as at the Telluride Film Festival and the Special Presentations section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. The film was released on November 6, 2015, by Open Road Films. It won numerous guilds and critics' association awards, and was named one of the finest films of 2015 by various publications.
In 2001, The Boston Globe hires a new editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber). Meeting with Walter "Robby" Robinson (Michael Keaton),
Baron discovers that Robinson heads the "Spotlight" team, a small group
of journalists whose articles are investigative in nature, but can take
up to a year to publish. When Baron reads a small column in the paper
about the pedophile priest John Geoghan, and a lawyer who says that Cardinal Law (the Archbishop of Boston) knew that Geoghan was sexually abusing children and did nothing to stop him, Baron urges the Spotlight Team to investigate the story.
Initially believing that they are following the story of one priest
who was moved around several times, the Spotlight Team begin to uncover a
pattern of sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests in Massachusetts, and an ongoing cover-up by the Boston Archdiocese. Through a man who heads a victim's rights organization, they widen their search to thirteen priests. They learn through an ex-priest
who worked trying to rehabilitate pedophile priests that there should
be approximately ninety abusive priests in Boston. Through their
research, they develop a list of eighty-seven names, and begin to find
their victims to back up their suspicions. When the September 11 attacks occur, the team is forced to deprioritize the story. They regain momentum when Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) finds that there are publicly available documents that confirm Cardinal Law was aware of the problem and ignored it. After The Boston Globe
wins a case to have even more legal documents unsealed, the Spotlight
Team finally begins to write the story, and plan to publish their
findings in early 2002.
As they are about to go to print, Robinson confesses to the team that
he was sent a list of twenty pedophile priests in 1993 in a story he
never followed up on. Baron, nevertheless, tells Robinson and the team
that the work they are doing is important. The story goes to print with a
link leading to the documents that expose Cardinal Law, and a phone
number requesting victims of pedophile priests to come forward. The
following morning, the Spotlight Team is inundated with phone calls from
victims coming forward to tell their stories.
The films ends with various real life information pertaining to the case, like how it won a Pulitzer Prize for civil service.
The Spotlight Team
- Mark Ruffalo as Michael Rezendes
- Michael Keaton as Walter "Robby" Robinson
- Rachel McAdams as Sacha Pfeiffer
- Liev Schreiber as Marty Baron
- John Slattery as Ben Bradlee Jr.
- Brian d'Arcy James as Matt Carroll
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