Spotlight

What it is about

In 2001 Marty Baron arrives as the new editor of The Boston Globe, and one of his first meetings is with Walter «Robby» Robinson, who leads the paper's investigative unit, Spotlight. The small team works on long-term projects that can take months, away from the daily pressure of the news cycle. After Baron reads a column about the lawyer Mitchell Garabedian, who claims that a cardinal knew about abuses by a priest and did nothing, he asks the team to look into the matter. Reporter Michael Rezendes makes contact with the lawyer, who at first refuses to speak with him. What seems to be a single case gradually opens onto something much broader, and the reporters must face the complexity of the search, its impact on the institutions involved and on their own lives. The film follows the reporting process with its doubts, its interviews, its documents and the tensions inside the newsroom, focusing on the craft of journalism rather than on spectacle.

How it was made

Tom McCarthy, who also directs, wrote the screenplay with Josh Singer, working from a large body of research material that they approached as a demanding assignment. McCarthy has said he initially turned the project down because of how daunting it seemed, and that the collaboration with Singer, two writers sorting through the same documents, helped them talk through and organize the facts. The script was completed in June 2013 and appeared on the 2013 Black List of unproduced screenplays. Singer has explained that the aim was not to shake anyone's faith but to show the power of a newsroom, something he feels has largely faded today.

The cast includes Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, Stanley Tucci and John Slattery, among others. Bryan Cranston was offered an unspecified role but turned it down because of scheduling conflicts with another project, and he later expressed regret about that decision.

Principal photography began on September 24, 2014, in Boston, and continued in October in Hamilton, Ontario. Locations included Fenway Park, the Globe's offices in Dorchester, the Boston Public Library and McMaster University. For the interior of the newsroom, a former Sears building in Toronto was converted into a replica of the old Globe offices, and the police station seen at the beginning was also shot in Toronto.

The editor Tom McArdle said the post-production process lasted eight months, during which five scenes and parts of others were cut, along with single lines to tighten the pacing. The visual style is restrained, favoring conversations, documents and working meetings. The storytelling aims at factual precision, although some moments were reshaped for dramatic reasons, as the production itself acknowledges.

Reception and legacy

The film premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, then played at Telluride and in the Special Presentations section of the Toronto International Film Festival. According to reports, the Venice audience gave it sustained applause. It opened in limited release in the United States on November 6, 2015, distributed by Open Road Films, and reached wide release three weeks later. Its worldwide gross was about 98 million dollars against a budget of 20 million, according to the figures reported.

Critics responded very warmly. It holds a 97 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a Metacritic score of 93 out of 100. Reviewers praised its restraint, the accuracy of its portrayal of reporting work and the performances of the ensemble. Several publications named it among the best films of 2015, and it placed third in the audience balloting at the Toronto festival.

At the Academy Awards it received six nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing and two supporting acting nominations, and it won Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. It is the first Best Picture winner to take fewer than three Oscars since The Greatest Show on Earth in 1952. It also earned Golden Globe nominations and won the Screen Actors Guild award for cast performance.

The Catholic Church responded with a mix of recognition and reservations. Vatican Radio called it honest and compelling and said it helped the American Church accept its responsibility. Other Catholic commentators described it as a generally accurate account while disagreeing with some of its portrayals and its view of the institution. There was also criticism from some who felt it did not fairly represent the role of therapists, and a dispute over the depiction of a school official played by Gary Galone, whom the real figure considered unfairly portrayed, while two of the reporters defended the scene as accurate. Open Road Films acknowledged that the dialogue for that character was fictionalized.

Over time the film has become a reference point for cinema about investigative journalism, and it appears on lists of the best films of the twenty-first century and of its best screenplays from that same period, confirming its place in recent film history.