Spotlight tells a real life story of a team of investigative journalist who are following some allegations that were made against the Catholic Church. In almost a year long investigation they uncovered bits and pieces of evidence that ultimately showed them that these allegations were not cases of some bad apples, instead it was a systemic phenomenon in the Catholic Church. The movie went on to describe that up to 6% of all the priests are child abuser, a statistic I personally find hard to swallow. The group then went on to proofing that these statistics were true. Mind Blown.

 

There are so many aspects of the movie that needs to be paid attention to, but lets firstly acknowledge how well written the script by Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer is, I for one think it is especially difficult to narrate a real life story of this caliber because of the tendencies of wanting to put as much information or point of views as possible into it (the movies Selma that was made about Martin Luther King is a brilliant example of a failing script), but the writers of Spotlight has managed to write a clean script that gives us just enough information to engage viewers into the real message of the movie. Brilliant work by both of them, and I do hope sincerely that the movie made enough money to make sure that we will see more of such intelligent writing in the future.

 

Secondly the acting cast was amazing. Mark Ruffalo (as the justice seeking Mike Rezendes) gave a very convincing performance that totally reflected how the audience felt for the most part: curious, angry, and desperate. Michael Keaton (as the super cool journalist Robby), Stanley Stucci (as the brave lawyer Garebedian) and Liev Schreiber (as the morally upright outsider Marty Baron) also gave great performances, these three in my opinion are the highest moral characters in the movie, characters viewers can certainly look up to. Rachel McAdams (as the empathetic Sacha) portrays beautifully the silent battle a person who grew up with faith must have investigating a story like this. The cast was superb, and all gave us a natural, not overly dramatised, performance that made the essence of the story slide into the Spotlight.

 

Thirdly, overall Spotlight shows an example of how movies should be. Spotlight is a well balanced, well rounded movie, it didn’t lay on the basis of just one great actor (like The Dark Knight that I still think is just a one man show of a performance of a lifetime by Heath Ledger as The Joker) or on over the top cinematography, the movie is simply a full package of all elements being just right. What this means simply is that during the movie, none of us needed to think about how unrealistic or how uncharacteristic anything is, instead we all could just go straight into the main problem of the movie: clergy sex abuse. This takes me to my last point.

 

The movie brought into the public eye sexual abuse by men in power (in this case Pastors of faith), and it did it not by selling pity or humiliating victims in a way that sometimes such movies do (like 12 Years a Slave being one movie depicting awful scenes to get its message across, not that I am saying that such movies aren’t beautiful by itself, it is simply too gut wrenching and pity inducing), and I truly appreciate it because of that. The movie raised so many questions without actually trying to be too pretentious on knowing that the answers are. One of the best lines of the movie to me was,

Mark my words, Mr. Rezendes. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.

There is so much truth in those words, and I think it is something we all must remember, when something bad is happening around us, what have we done to stop it?

 

When was the last time a movie taught you something real about the world around us? Simply just for that reason I believe that Spotlight is definitely worth watching.