‘Spotlight’ a true portrait of an investigation

Writing for a newspaper isn’t a glamour job, but until Friday’s release of “Spotlight,” it was still possible to fool outsiders. The film, which tells the behind-the-scenes story of how a Boston Globe investigative team uncovered the sex abuse scandal within the Catholic Church, provides an accurate picture of how journalism is done at a major American newspaper. [...] when Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) arrives at the Bosyon Globe as the new editor, he is not greeted as an injection of a new talent but as a virus that must be contained. Even the audience gets ready to think of him as a meddling outsider, until he starts talking — at his very first news meeting — about going after charges of sex abuse among Catholic priests. “Spotlight” is very much set within the specific culture of Boston in 2001, with the Catholic Church a power player among the city’s organizations and Cardinal Bernard Law as not only religious figure but politician and business leader. Most of the Globe’s reporting staff are either Catholic or raised Catholic, and they understand and to some degree even share, at first, the pervasive idea that the church, despite its faults, is a positive force and maybe deserves the benefit of the doubt. The movie finds drama, not in telling the audience what it doesn’t know, but in showing us people finding out the scope and dimension of what we already know, and then letting us see them react with shock, horror and a firm sense of purpose. The movie takes turns following Robinson and reporters Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) and Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), and their different styles vary the movie’s energy. Robinson travels in the power circles, drinks in the best bars and plays golf with everybody who’s anybody. “Spotlight” shows those moments when information seems to drop from heaven, when a reporter expects a struggle and instead finds people willing to talk. Over the course of the movie, the Spotlight team brings a huge gun onto a battlefield — that is, the power of the press — then calibrates its sights very carefully, with the dread knowledge that if they make one mistake, if they are a degree or two off, they’ll be blowing themselves up.