“Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.”

— Napoleon Bonaparte

In 2001 the new chief executive editor for the Boston Globe, Marty Baron, (Liev Schreiber, best known for TV’s Ray Donovan in a cool, powerful performance) arrived from the Miami Herald to take the reins of the fabled Boston paper.

He came at a time when the first drops of an oncoming news storm that roiled this strong paper began to fall.

That year the Globe, New England’s most powerful paper, put together a world shaking expose about the decades-long scandal of child sexual abuse in Boston’s Catholic church.

But Baron, as one character puts it, “an unmarried man of the Jewish faith who hates baseball,” is a serious and brilliant newspaper man who wins them over. He is given the details about 14 local priests involved in the scandal. Baron wants a different approach. He wants not just the rotten apples that have fallen from the Boston church. That’s been done before with weak and forgotten results. Baron wants the tree itself shaken, even uprooted, unveiled from the top down.

At once the paper’s crack investigating team tabbed “Spotlight” is set to the task, and what a team and cast it is.

Along with Oscar nominee Michael Keaton (“Birdman”) as “Robby” Robinson, the top dog, the team members include Mark Ruffalo (“Fox Catcher”) as Mike Rezendes, the most aggressive and volatile of the crew, and Rachel McAdams (“Wedding Crashers,” “True Detective”) as Sacha Pfeiffer.

It’s Pfeiffer who had to do the leg work and interview the “survivors,” the young boys and girls who were the victims of the errant priests. Some, she discovered, became addicts, a few committed suicide.

It’s filled out with Brian d’Arcy James (“Game Change”) as Matt Carroll, who did the computer file digging.

The perfect cast is topped off with John Slattery (“Mad Men”) as Ben Bradlee Jr., assistant managing editor who was responsible for investigative reporting and helped bring a Pulitzer Prize to the paper.

We get Stanley Tucci and Billy Crudup as opposing lawyers, and Len Cariou (“Blue Bloods”) as the central figure, Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, then the Archbishop of Boston.

Writer/director and ex-actor Tom McCarthy, with screenwriter Josh Singer, carves a brilliant piece of moviemaking. With this splendid team, he went over every move the original reporters made, put in every comma and period of the originals and put together what most critics already consider one of the top newspaper movies of all time, rivaling “All the President’s Men,” a movie that has startling connections with “Spotlight.”

Editor Ben Bradlee Jr., (a Colby College graduate) who oversaw the expose, is the son of the late famed Ben Bradlee who helmed the Washington Post during the investigation of Watergate. That series by famed reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward brought down the administration of President Richard Nixon.

Woodward and Bernstein’s book then became the award-winning 1976 movie directed by Alan J. Pakula.

Both newspapers won Pulitzer Prizes for their work, the Globe’s in 2003, the Post’s for public service in 1973.

Fans of both movies will note that Pakula’s film was fashioned as a taut, dramatic thriller with basement garage scenes, the heroes being tailed on dark wet streets and having phones tapped. McCarthy’s “Spotlight” is a clear and clean story of the heroic, everyday hard work of newspaper reporters and editors.

McCarthy’s brilliant “Spotlight,” unlike Pakula’s dark, shadowy streets thriller, films most of its story on the stark, cold, bright daylight streets of the city that hid the crimes for decades, a choice that makes the details of the horrific scandal all the more shocking.

“Spotlight,” one of this year’s best movies, will soon find its place in the annals of great newspaper films.

While we’re at it, let’s give thanks and a standing ovation this Thanksgiving to the men and women of America’s newspapers, great and small. At a time when big media explodes in large multi colors, it’s the daily newspapers that tell the truth in tiny black letters.

J.P. Devine is a former stage and screen actor.

Copy the Story Link