Jeremy’s Tophunder №29: Spotlight

7 min readApr 13, 2020

I saw Spotlight for the first time in December of 2015, in the week between Christmas and New Year’s. I went by myself, to the Somerville Theater in Davis Square. I had gone to see The Big Short with my family the night before or a few nights earlier, but I wanted to catch Spotlight also.

The reason my memory of seeing Spotlight is so specific is not because it’s a great movie. It is a great movie, but that’s not why I remember it so vividly. The memory is seared into my brain because of the epilogue of text that follows the final scene. Considering Spotlight is based on a true story that has received widespread media attention over the last 20 years, I don’t feel bad spoiling anything, so I’ll just post the scene below. The piece I’m talking about starts around the 2:38 mark:

When the list of places where abuse had been discovered came onto the screen, there was a sound that came from the audience that I had never heard before at a movie theater. It was halfway between a gasp and a murmur that lingered, for a while.

When the screen flashed with the text “Major abuse scandals have been uncovered in the following places:” I was expecting to see a list of maybe 15 or 20 cities around the world. I obviously knew about the Boston story, and I knew about the Los Angeles scandal (with it’s record-breaking $660 million settlement), and I knew that there was widespread abuse across several dioceses in Pennsylvania, and from there just assumed that there must be several others around the country and around the world.

I wasn’t prepared for the screen to flash with a list of 50 cities.

Then before I could realize the list was just places in the United States, and listed alphabetically from A through M, the screen changed again and 50 more cities appeared. Then 50 cities from around the world. Then 50 more.

It took about 20 seconds for all the blood to drain out of my head. It felt like the ending of Saving Private Ryan or Avengers: Infinity War or Glory or The Wrestler. I left the theater in a serious funk.

Having lived in Boston my entire life, I obviously have somewhat of an affinity for movies set in Boston. Spotlight hit even closer to home when you also take into account that my mother is a journalist and I was raised in a Catholic family. The scandal was a topic of conversation in our house for a while when this story broke.

Being Catholic was a pretty big part of my childhood. It seemed like kids I grew up with were all either Catholic, Jewish, or their family didn’t practice religion at all. The overwhelming majority of my friends attended CCD growing up. Most of us also attended church. There was a portion of my life where the rule was I had to attend church in order to watch football on Sundays. I watched the Patriots win the 2002 Super Bowl at a church, at a party organized by the youth group. One of my favorite memories from high school was attending an overnight at the church as part of the lead-up to Confirmation. Granted, I always (mostly) hated actually going to church, and most of the religious aspects of it — I went because I was a kid and my parents wanted me to.

After the abuse scandal broke, we still participated in the church, mostly because my brother and I were so close to confirmation that it made sense to see it through, but it certainly was less emphasized. We stopped going as a family around this time (which means I all but stopped altogether), and I haven’t been to church outside of attending weddings or funerals, or on Christmas or Easter, in over a decade. But I still consider being Catholic a not insignificant piece of my culture and heritage.

The movie encapsulates all of these things really well. Boston is a stereotypically Irish Catholic city, and that culture is deeply embedded into the fabric of the city. It made The Globe feel like a local paper (which it very much was and continues to be in some respects), even though it’s one of the 10-most read newspapers in the country (which includes de facto national papers like USA Today and The Wall Street Journal). Boston very much feels like a Big City and a small town at the same time — it’s hard to describe unless you’ve spent a decent amount of time here — and Spotlight captures that blend as much or more as any movie I’ve seen (and certainly does the best of any movie on my list, of which five are at least partially set in Boston).

The Boston accent is a contentious piece of the city’s culture — it can be abrasive to hear for people who don’t encounter it regularly, and native Bostonians bristle when it’s portrayed poorly. Spotlight actually does a pretty good job with it. Michael Keaton pulls it off pretty well, and several of the other main actors (Rachel McAdams and Mark Ruffalo in particular) don’t even really attempt it. That’s the aspect of the accent that a lesser movie might have forgotten about— it’s not like -everyone- from Boston talks the same way. A lot of people who grew up in and around Boston don’t have much of an accent to speak of at all. To me, it’s more of a Boston dialect than an accent — there’s a certain cadence and vocabulary that goes along with the voice. Actors like Jamey Sheridan and John Slattery and Stanley Tucci didn’t really do the voice, but to me, they still felt like characters from Boston.

It’s a very well-acted movie. Does Mark Ruffalo try way too hard in a few scenes? Yes. Yes he does. Short of that, though, I was really impressed by Keaton, McAdams, Liev Schrieber, Billy Crudup, and especially Brian d’Arcy James, who I’m not sure I had ever seen before. It’s another movie that is almost exclusively people sitting and talking, and doesn’t take a lot of chances visually. It relies on the script and the actors. They delivered here.

The piece of the movie that needles at me a little bit is what seems like a few moments where they try to fake-hint at someone at the newspaper being The Bad Guy. There’s a few moments where it seems like John Slattery wants to pull the plug on the story, and there is a moment or two where they try to make it seem like Michael Keaton drags his feet without a great reason to. I’m not sure if the feeling I get from those scenes was intentional on the part of the filmmakers to maintain a certain level of tension, or if there was some genuine disconnect between the reporters and their superiors. In the end, it seemed pretty clear that there wasn’t anything nefarious going on with the investigation — it was just a bunch of people conscientiously doing their jobs — so I remain a little unclear why some scenes are arranged in a way that makes it seem like they’re hinting at something being amiss.

Either way, Spotlight remains a wonderful movie, a celebration of investigative journalism and good people standing up against powerful institutions. Prior to Spotlight, I knew Tom McCarthy more as an actor — he played a dishonest newspaper reporter on The Wire, he played John Cusack’s ex-wife’s new fiance in 2012, and had bit parts in a few other movies and shows that I’ve seen. I never realized that his “real” career was behind the camera, writing and directing The Station Agent and The Visitor (neither of which I’ve seen, but I had known of as being well-regarded), as well as receiving writing credits for Up and Million Dollar Arm (hey, you win some, you lose some).

Spotlight ties together a number of elements that I tend to like a lot in movies — Boston, journalists tracking down a story, a great ensemble cast, and a story based on actual events. It marries them together extremely well, and hammers them home with a few impact scenes (some of which are admittedly heavy-handed). It’s not the highest-ranked Boston movie on my list, it’s not the highest-ranked journalism movie on my list, and it’s not the highest-ranked true story on my list, but it’s the only movie that puts all of them together. That’s good enough to crack into the Top 30.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One

22. Remember The Titans

24. Apollo 13

27. All The President’s Men