* Spotlight is the most grown-up film I’ve seen in a good long while.
It ultimately serves as an indictment (presented in the most humane manner imaginable) of the gradual atomization of our best and brightest (which is how the journalists are depicted) from the social ties that once kept them connected to the common life of the community.
It finally dawns on Keaton that everyone knew but him, and the lawyer for the church (his lifelong friend) asks him, “why didn’t you?”
It was his job, after all.
The unspoken answer: because he’d fallen away from the church that raised him, as did all the other journalists who were the last to know. Throughout the film, there’s a longing for that lost connection.
