Journalists are constantly exasperated by the depiction of journalism in the movies: crusading reporters who never take notes write their own (very bad) headlines for stories based on hunches, improbable disclosures, lucky breaks and dramatic confrontations.
So among the many deeply satisfying aspects of this film, which stakes an early claim for a spot on the year's top-10 list, is that the reporters in it act like reporters. They make a lot of phone calls, take notes, wheedle and plead and doorstep: they use rulers to guide their line-by-line searches through directories and documents (the film is set in the internet's infancy); they drink a lot of bad coffee.
The embedded idea - that most good journalism is unglamorous, hard-slog drudgery - may seem an unprepossessing concept for a film. But Spotlight enthralls because it remains so faithful to the facts, eschewing cheap theatrics and heroic mythmaking. Like the journos whose work it depicts, it never forgets that it's all about the story.
That story drove a series of reports in the Boston Globe in 2002 after reporters of the title's investigative section had spent more than a year researching allegations of sexual abuse by the city's Catholic clergy. But rather than rush into print piecemeal, they kept digging, slowly uncovering a widespread pattern and a calculated and cynical coverup.
The echoes of the Spotlight story have been - and continue to be -- heard around the world, of course, which is the reason director McCarthy (best known here for The Station Agent and The Visitor) shows such respect for history. His film starts, as the real story did, with the arrival of a new editor, Marty Baron (Schreiber). An outsider New Yorker - described by one character as "an unmarried man of the Jewish faith who hates baseball" - he brings fresh eyes to a city whose political and cultural life is saturated with Catholicism, and when he reads a column about a priest charged with abusing children, he wonders aloud whether there is more to it.
