Spotlight

When I was nine, and my brother eleven, we lived in Camp Fuchinobe, an idyllic former Japanese Army Post in rural Japan. There were high mountains in the distance, and our house had a ceremonial pond in the front yard, a private forest in the back. Each Sunday and Holy Day, our Brooklyn-born, Irish Catholic, mother would take us to mass at the chapel in Sagamihara.

The three kids of the Jones household were baptized Catholic despite having a Southern Baptist father from Ocilla, Georgia. There were First Communions, Confirmations, and Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. My brother and I were altar boys, of course -- serving together, overwhelmed at each mass by the ancient strange rituals, chanting our memorized Latin responses to the priest as he said the mass. Enthralled, on feast days, by the pomp and circumstance of High Mass, mesmerized by the priest's certain authority, as fervent, at that age, as the saints we learned about in Catechism.

We were taught to call the priests "Father," as they were our spiritual fathers. Many years later, as an adult at a friend's wedding, the priest introduced himself as Father Rick. Call me Rick, he insisted.

I didn't.

While in Japan, one winter, after mass, the priest invited my brother and me to go skiing with him. We would take the train to the mountains and stay at a chalet owned by the Army. We were beyond thrilled, and when we got home, ran to tell our father about the wonderful invitation.

"Absolutely not," was the answer... with no further explanation.

There was, surprisingly, no protestation from my mother.

Looking back, now, it's obvious, they knew.

I thought about that, and other priests I knew as a kid, wondering about whether they were pedophiles, as I sat in the darkness before the start of one of the best movies of 2015, Spotlight.

I knew it was about the Boston Globe breaking the story of rampant pedophilia among priests in one of the most Catholic of all American cities.

Indeed, unfortunately, we know all too much about the Church's cover up here in Chicago.

As a movie, it is a riveting experience as the understated, but highly effective script tells a complicated story without a misstep or cartoon character. At its heart, it is an organic explication of what newspapers do. Spotlight follows a story, a big story, a 'heater' story as it happens from start to finish. The direction, script, and acting transport us from a movie theater in Evanston to the Boston Globe, to being in the Spotlight team's room as reporting is done.

What a phrase that is: "reporting is done."

How is it done? Especially at a time when universal information wasn't at everyone's fingertips through Google and databases on everything. When libraries, courthouses, and the newspaper's own clip file were the tools of the trade. Gritty, boring, grunt work to nail the story, to verify interviews, to work out all the supporting detail necessary to make the story, and to pass an editor's tough scrutiny. A believable movie about an era that seems to be gone with the wind as newspapers become websites, or out of business, or just dimly remembered.

The acting in Spotlight is the best sort of acting: you don't notice it. There are stars in all the key roles, but they disappear into their characters. In a brief role that should win an Oscar, Michael Cyril Creighton, an actor unknown to me, plays a gay man raped as a young boy by a priest. A hip, cool, priest, who cruelly takes advantage of the boy's confusion and fear from growing up gay in a tough working-class Boston neighborhood. When, in a scene that will stay with anyone seeing Spotlight, he begins to cry, there is no actor's artifice or technique evident, just pure humanity on the screen.

But, really, in terms of 'acting', the same could be said for the entire cast of Spotlight.

We live in deeply troubled times. No one seems to believe in anything anymore. I think you can trace that fairly new reality to the second great sin of American history: Vietnam. It was a war and time in the United States that fundamentally broke the relationship between citizen and state, made United States almost ironic, in a way that pollutes politics to this day.

When was the last time you really believed anything that a president has to say? When was the last time you didn't laugh and slang at a presidential spokesperson? Or, watching the preening opening statements of any Congressional hearing?

Or, didn't snort in derision at least once a day at how the 'news' is decided upon and covered by the media?

Even the progressive movement, nobly born out of the civil rights movement and Vietnam protests, now seems satisfied to merely embrace fads, seeking not fundamental change, but government funding for profit, and television sound bites for relevance.

And, for the faithful, given the pedophile scandal that rocked Catholicism, a church once built metaphorically on a rock, supported through millennia by the faith of hundreds of millions, is now metaphorically derelict, with every priest suspect.

Much of this is the result of a spotlight cast on the church allowing, and then hiding, a mortal sin of unforgivable perversity. A spotlight cast by dedicated reporters, working for a paper and ink newspaper. Through a movie doing what great movies do: using words and light on a screen to tell a deeply compelling story.

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