Review: Spotlight

After winning an Oscar for the Best Picture later, Spotlight has arrived in North East!

The movie follows a team of elite journalists (called suggestively Spotlight) on their way of uncovering decades of children abuses made by priests and hidden by church.

When a new editor comes to the Boston Globe, Spotlight is assigned a new task: to follow and undertake heavy research about priest abuses on molested children. The team is formed by four people: Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James) and their editor Walter ‘Robby’ Robinson (Michael Keaton).

It has several crucial moments:

First one is approximately 45 minutes into the action, when Mitchell Garabedian (a trustful lawyer) calls one of the abused children (now a grown up) the lucky one – because he is still alive. A well constructed soundtrack leaves the audience a moment to understand the meaning of his line: most of the molested children have taken their own lives and few have had the strength to survive.

Second moment is when all Spotlight journalists are gathered and start to figure out the number of priest-abusers. What started as a story with one abuser, grows to 13 known molesters and then they receive a tip with a report in which six per cent of the priests in a city are proven to be child molesters – set in Boston, it raises the number to 80 allegedly rapers. The elite team soon discovers and tracks down 70 proven abusers.

And not the last key scene is at the middle of the movie when while interviewing one of the victims, Sacha asks him about the reaction of his mother when the bishop visits their house and admit one priest`s abuse. The answer is simply shocking: she has offered the bishop cookies – no criminal charges, nor police complains has been filled by his legal guardian. This is important since it shows how victims coming from religious or poor environments had no escapes or chances to be rescued.

This movie is abundant with critical moments that leave the audience speechless.

This movie throws a green light over journalists and their important role in society. Non journalists had inside access to a though world where people think little of you – shut the front door in your face, yell or are disappointed you cannot remember things they’ve told to a colleague of yours years ago.

The line given by lawyer Mitchell Garabedian: “if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse them” – advocates that the silent treatment and covering a crime can produce a chain reaction that eventually is burning the city, unless there is someone willing to be discredited until the truth is proven.

Spotlight deserves the Oscar for the Best Picture and perhaps much more for they focused on the story, rather than on an actor and it has revealed the challenges journalists face in order to make a good and reliable news story.

It might not be your Sunday cup of tea, but it deserves your attention.

You can see Spotlight at ODEON Silverlink and Metrocentre and from Match 6th at Empire Sunderland and Newcastle.