collaborating with evil
by Douglas Messerli
Thomas
McCarthy and Josh Singer (screenplay), Thomas McCarthy (director) Spotlight / 2015
Yet these films are vastly different in
tone and significance. The Pakula work centers upon two cub reporters working
together against almost impossible odds to not only discover the truth but to “make”
their reputations, and in those attempts they take far greater chances and are
forced to work far more quickly that the reporter-team, working for the Spotlight column of The Boston Globe. Pakula’s film, accordingly, is far splashier and
energized as the two, with the help of the beleaguered newspaper publisher,
hone in on the shocking development that leads directly to the guilt of the
President of the United States.
Whereas All the President’s Men worked a bit like a quick peeling of an
onion to get to its rotten core, Spotlight
begins with a core that demands the team put the layers of reality back
into place around it in order to perceive the very structure of the whole.
The writers and directors of Spotlight might have easily made a
splashy film revealing the names of priests and the cover-up of their behavior
by Boston Cardinal Bernard Law (Len Cariou), but have fortunately determined to
see the larger picture, exposing not only the individual situations but the
larger corruption of the church as a whole and the contagion of its church-going
flock. Within nearly specific is a network of family and community members,
church supporters, priests, church leaders, law-makers and, yes, even reporters
who fail the young boys and girls internationally, abetting in the selfish
sexual actions of individuals who pretend to represent just the opposite.
And it is the moments throughout this
film when each of these characters and others realize their complete
entrenchment in the complacent society around them that we become involved in
the film, becoming uncomfortable with easy assumptions. In the midst of seeking
out the name of priests described as “on leave”—one of the several terms church
leaders use to describe priests who have been found guilty of child
abuse—Carroll discovers that one of the houses caring for the guilty priests,
sits a few yards away from his own home, and rushes home to warn his own
children with a refrigerator announcement. Pfeiffer is forced to keep her
painful research secret from the aunt with whom she lives, and suddenly finds
herself psychologically unable to attend church once a week with her. Rezendes
is haunted by the fact that the files he discovers have long been available,
but have been illegally frozen from public view. Robinson gradually perceives
that one of the pedophiles was a coach in his own high school, and that one of his
victims was a school friend of years earlier.
Their’s and the entire community’s
failures to pursue the claims of those who have suffered from these terrible
sexual acts have helped to embitter the small survivor’s group (SNAP), headed
by Phil Saviano (Neal Huff), as well as attorney Garabedian, who has worked
tirelessly to help afflicted families without getting any significant judicial
response or communal recognition.
Even more remarkably, however, is that
this carefully wrought and morally significant film not only ultimately points
to the community in which these real events first came to light, but to the
Catholic Church throughout the world. That the newspaper’s 2002 and 2003
analyses of what it had previously failed to explore received no response from
the Church leaders and that the film was positively reviewed in several
religiously-aligned newspapers suggests that, finally, the Spotlight’s ensemble reporting had a true effect on church and
society.
If such events will surely continue to
happen in the future, we can at least hope that journalists and city leaders
will no longer be able to bury them in print or hide them from their public
filings.
Ultimately, if the events recounted in All the President’s Men resulted in the
downfall of a somewhat paranoid President Nixon and his advisors, Spotlight traces a larger arc in the
possible resolution and admission of guilt for the thousands of young people
robbed of their social innocence and spiritual faith. Possibly, the church may
even find a way to help these people to begin to believe in it once again.
Los Angeles,
November 29, 2015
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