What would you say about a mainstream film that plays tribute to a real-life investigative story that happened albeit more than a decade ago? “Wonderful” suffices because journalists are well aware of how careers and personas are portrayed in cinema and how distanced it all can be from real life. For them, more importantly, their characters, love lives, personal inter-relationships are always prioritised over the stories they have done or are doing at any given moment. But Spotlight, a Hollywood film scheduled for release in India, is different. It treads a different path by bringing into focus a Ripley&’s Believe-It-Or-Not story picked from the Boston Globe that chased a dramatic and radical expose for more than a year to unfold a sex scandal of unimaginable significance, consequence and ramifications.

Spotlight picks up its title from the actual name of the Boston Globe team that worked unceasingly on this expose, a blatant violation of child rights cushioned with a decades-long cover-up by the powers that be. It uncovered decades of widespread abuse of children within the Catholic Church implicating the highest levels of the clergy that rocked the city, its major institutions and, ultimately, the world. The team bagged the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2003 and the expose also received other honors such as the George Polk Award for National Reporting, the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, the Associated Press Managing Editors’ Freedom of Information Award and the Taylor Award for Fairness in Newspapers. It took a lot of guts, perseverance and determination by the team to uncover what it did in the most exalted and trusted of institutions – The Catholic Church — shedding light on a systematic cover-up of widespread paedophilia perpetrated by more than 70 local priests.

Presented by Entertainment One Features, Spotlight the film is directed by Tom McCarth and stars Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, Brian d’Arcy James and Billy Crudup. The screenplay is jointly by Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer. Masanobu Takayanagi is director of photography, Stephen H Carter is production designer, Wendy Chuck took care of the costumes and the film is produced by Michael Sugar, Steve Golin, Nicole Rocklin and Blye Pagon Faust and has a running time of 128 minutes.

When newly appointed editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) arrives from Miami to take charge of the Boston Globe in the summer of 2001, he immediately directs the Spotlight team to follow up on a column about a local priest accused of having sexually abused dozens of young parishioners over the course of 30 years. Fully aware that taking on the Catholic Church in Boston will have major ramifications, Spotlight editor Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton), reporters Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) and Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), and researcher Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James) begin to dig more deeply.

As they confer with victims’ attorney Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci), who had interviewed adults who were molested as children, and pursue the release of sealed court records, it becomes clear that the Church&’s systematic protection of predatory priests is far more wide-reaching than any of them had ever imagined. Despite staunch resistance from Church officials, including Boston&’s Cardinal Law (Len Cariou), the Globe publishes its blockbuster exposé in January 2002, leading the way for similar revelations in more than 200 other cities around the world. The Censor Board in India has passed it without any cuts with an A rating.

The film has garnered a total of six Academy Award nominations in the categories of Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Mark Ruffalo), Best Supporting Actress (Rachel McAdams) and Best Editing. It most recently won a Screen Actors’ Guild Award for Best Ensemble Cast. Each of the journalists portrayed in the film gave support to McCarthy and his production. “It was backed by the careful and thoughtful treatment we got from the real journalists that gave both authenticity and strength to the film. Their interaction with us was a learning experience because it was an intelligent, well researched, lucid and fact-based interpretation of the events. I cannot imagine what I would have done had they not been involved in this entire project,” says McCarthy.

Some groups, he adds, were trying to read into Marty Baron things based on bias. “They were trying to make something out of the fact that he was Jewish and so an ‘outsider’ in the Catholic community or bias based on small things picked out of his personal life. In many ways this reflected in our story. I was a bit uncertain about how he would react to our portrayal but when I came to know him, I realised that he does not care at all about what people think of him or his stories. He is really focused on the long lead story, and for him, knowing that this could be a shot in the arm for investigative journalism he was going to do everything he could to support it.” Meeting Baron, who is now editor of The Washington Post, was, at first, a nerve-wracking encounter for both McCarthy and Liev Schreiber, who plays Marty in the film.

Stephen H Carter, who did the production design, says, “I got the opportunity to dress several scenes that were shot on the actual premises of the Boston Globe. The presses, the library — there is an incredible amount of production value we could not have got any other way other than shooting there. The people at the Globe were incredibly supportive throughout the project so it would have been foolish to not take advantage of that opportunity.” But he also had to recreate a major metropolitan news operation during the seismic shift from the print to web publishing era. Carter measured the layout of the Globe&’s headquarters and then used those specs to recreate 120 cubicles in a vacant Sears department store outside of Toronto. “The newsroom is one of the things we really wanted to control pretty tightly,” says Carter, who previously worked on Best Picture Oscar—winner Birdman: Or, The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance.

Rachel McAdams plays the role of Sacha Pfeiffer, part of the Spotlight team. She insisted on interviewing the child victims and continues to keep in touch with them. For her, it is not a story she leaves behind after it was over and the cheering stopped, the accolades and awards merely a spur for her to move on. How many investigative journalists would persist with the follow-up with children now grown up and trying to cope with trauma suffered more than a decade ago?

Stanley Tucci says, “It is not about being anti-religion or anti-Catholicism, it is anti-abuse of that — the abuse of faith, the abuse of trust. It is also about the importance of great reporting and how valuable that is. It is a condemnation of the people who took advantage of Catholicism and the basic tenets of Christianity, which are, ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. I hope people do not see this as some kind of anti-Catholic film. I think it is the opposite of that.”

In December 2002, Cardinal Law resigned from the Boston Archdiocese – within which  249 priests have been publicly accused of sexual abuse — and was reassigned to the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. As of 2008, there were 1,476 victims who had survived such abuse in the Boston area. Nationwide, 6,427 priests have been accused of sexually abusing 17,259 victims. In the years since team Spotlight&’s report, sexual abuse by Catholic priests has been uncovered in 105 American cities and 102 dioceses worldwide. (Source: www.bishop-accountability.org, a database compiled by Terry McKiernan.)

Thanks to Spotlight the film and Spotlight the investigative team, there is this wonderful tribute to investigative journalism. Few Indian films have ventured into this more or less “forbidden” territory, and the few that did have all but vanished into oblivion. The last we recall of any Hollywood film that dealt with journalistic stories at high levels was All the President&’s Men.