Winter is movie season, and I feel like ours officially started Sunday night (there was seriously nothing interesting at our multiplex over Thanksgiving).
We went to see Spotlight, which I’ve been anticipating since I first heard about it. The film tells the story of the Boston Globe investigation and reporting on clergy sex abuse in Boston. Their reporting resulted in the resignation of Archbishop Bernard Law, the first time the hierarchy has faced any penalty and been shown to have moved priests around and covered up sex abuse.
It is the least cinematic story I think I’ve ever seen, and yet it is quite compelling. It is compelling mostly for its set of performances. I love Mark Ruffalo in anything, and he is quite good here, as are Rachel McAdams and Michael Keaton as the reporting staff. John Slatterly does a version of Roger Sterling (his Mad Men role) and Liev Schreiber’s character is really important and well done. Stanley Tucci, Jamey Sheridan, and Billy Crudup give wonderful performances as lawyers on both sides. Mostly, though, it’s people talking to each other– in Boston, which also has a starring role.
There’s a lot of exposition in this film. The reporters get schooled in the sex abuse scandal, and so do we. One of the most interesting ways exposition is the telephone interviews with the character Richard Sipe, author of Sex, Priests, and Power. He is also a former monk and priest at the abbey where I am an Oblate. As someone who studied the issue of priests’ sexual practices intensively for 30 years, Sipe’s findings informed the reporters at The Globe as they proceeded in their investigation. They start out being alarmed that there could be as many as 13 priests guilty of sexually abusing minors in the diocese. Sipe’s findings suggest there could be 90.
This is a movie about investigative journalism. The elite “spotlight” team, working on stories in relative secrecy and over a long period of time, are directed to this story by their new editor, Marty Baron (Schreiber), an outsider– not from Boston and Jewish. All of the reporters, insiders in the culture, have their own journeys to take and their own loyalties and assumptions to overcome. It is a movie about a cultural reality that I think would be very hard for most Americans to understand– the power of the Catholic Church in a city like Boston even as recently as 2001. Even, though it has been brought very low, today. Mostly it is a movie about digging deeper and deeper– among resources that are also completely on the surface, mostly accessible for thirty years and untouched. Even the Globe, it turns out, has turned away from this story for decades.
The film does an incredibly good job, too, with the victim statements and interviews. It maintains a level of dispassion about the interviews that is reflective of the journalism. It tells us enough, shows us the deep pain and disruption for the victims, without exploiting them or becoming maudlin. Some might think the film doesn’t go far enough in this area, in telling the story of what happened to the victims. I think it’s pretty brilliant– it’s exactly the way the story exists in the real world. Everyone actually knows what is going on. We all know, in 2015, what went on. And the story they want to tell, the goal they want to accomplish, is to topple the hierarchy and expose not the actions of the priests as much as the corruption and crimes of Archbishop Bernard Law who moved those priests around and thus allowed their criminal activity to continue.
In the end, what the movie gets so right, is an expression of our complete complicity as a society, and of our loss. When reporter Michael Rezendes (Ruffalo) expresses his sense of loss– he was not a practicing Catholic but always thought the Catholic Church would always be there to go back to, that there would be a chance for renewed faith that now seems lost– we see the stakes and perhaps why so many averted their eyes to what was happening.
And we experience this complicity not just in clergy sexual abuse, but in the sexual abuse of children that goes on in homes and in institutions throughout the United States. I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and I have spent decades considering the psychology of the silence surrounding it. I kept the secret about what happened to me to protect my family. To protect myself. So that I could grow up they way I was meant to grow up.
And my fingers hover over the keyboard when it comes to typing the name of Richard Sipe. He is not seen as a hero in these parts. His name is not spoken with pride for the good work he’s done for victims. The whole picture of the sex abuse crisis is muddied and muddled with pain. Because of the decades of silence, I fear we might not be able to ever get it right.
This film is brilliantly written and acted. It does a good deal to show the depth of the pain, the hubris of the powerful, the banality of the evil that was the cover-up. In the end, Bernard Law is forced to resign– only to be whisked off to a powerful position in the Vatican. But the last scene– who calls The Globe and more importantly, who does not– tells you all you need to know.