Spotlight
The Church is an institution, Mike, made of men. It's passing. My faith is in the eternal. I try to separate the two.
Spotlight is a movie I watch over and over again. It's about a horrific subject matter, and I ask myself why I relive this story over and over again. It’s an incredible story not just about journalism, but about truth revealed through journalism.
There's so much written about the dedication to depicting the hard parts of journalism - the tedious fact checking, the patience required to get a story right, the agonizing over how the story is written - but I think the underlying message is more than the importance of your local newspaper.
Just looking at one of the characters:
For Robinson (Keaton), this is a story about coming to terms with sin. Not only the realization that he completely missed the cases, but the idea that he had a role in this abuse occurring and continuing without justice. Throughout the film, we see the way that journalism, like most other institutions in the city, can be made part of the cogs that protect the church. Even if it's through less direct methods like writing a story that puts a smaller target on the church. That final moment where he's watching the phones light up, realizing the countless victims that he failed, but finally stepping up to act (physically done literally by picking up the phone) is as thematically perfect an arc a character could have. This is a Catholic movie after all. There is no sin without the chance for redemption.
And this little story being told is exactly why Spotlight is better than journalism(TM) movies like The Post or September 5. Because the end message isn't about the publication it's portraying or the profession as a whole. It's about the people behind the stories, the people within those stories, and the way those stories ripple throughout their communities.
One of the most important things Spotlight does is refuse to shy away from failure. It doesn’t just tell the story of the journalists who broke the case—it also shows how the Globe itself was tangled up in the same institutional failures as the courts, the police, and everyone else who should’ve done their job decades ago. The movie doesn’t let anyone off the hook. There is no shying away from the failures. But through that reckoning and penance you can find hope and justice.