The incidences identified by the efforts of Boston Globe reporters in 2001-02 are the sum total of why I’ve come to regard the Catholic Church as being little more than a global pedophile exchange ring. Bill Maher put it best when he presupposed that if a corporation which owned a chain of day care centres found its staff doing what (the film suggests) 6% of priests get up to, then after finding out hid the evidence, moved the perpetrators to a different part of the country or world, and essentially coerced the accusers into silence… the CEO of that organisation would be in prison. Surely.

But that’s not how the world works, apparently.

I’m not anti-Catholics, or anti-anyone who is of faith. To possess any level of religious devotion requires a level of faith I have never been blessed with. The central premise of Spotlight is that a group of investigative journalists (remember them?) uncover and shine the titular spotlight on a system in a ‘big-C’ Catholic town like Boston, where the Church is infallible, and to take any steps in bringing it down is literal sacrilege.

Tom McCarthy’s film Spotlight is a rare bird these days, in that it takes a pared-down, substantial look at the efforts of newspaper folk to uncover a matter of public concern in a serious, thought-out manner. Investigative print journalism seems to be a rare species as well – and we’re all getting older, so it’s fitting that this film is set in 2001-02 and in as much is a period piece.

It’s a fine piece of work; a great cast, a serious, smart script about smart people doing important things. McCarthy, as co-writer and director goes back to basics – there exists in the film very little flash or sizzle, only a couple of ‘actorly’ moments. It has in its DNA the likes of All the President’s Men – a film about print media that’s about the nuts and bolts of it, done by unglamorous people in less than interesting outfits, simply getting it done. It makes you yearn for a higher calibre of news journalism, one skewing from sensationalism, gossip and nonsense. It’s a good story, well-intentioned, well-told. You couldn’t ask for much more.

If there is a fault, it’s a minor one, a quibble. We have a cast of fine actors working on wholly solid ground here. There is an element of how vitally important a civic identity is among Boston natives, and the accent from that part of the world is distinct to say the least (‘Southies’, as they’re called, get a lot of airtime in Mystic River, The Departed, The Fighter and Good Will Hunting). So we have actors like Mark Ruffalo and Michael Keaton playing locals, and in doing so, they lay on thick ‘Bahh-stun’ accents (which is kind of like the Australian, heavily influenced by the Irish, where most of the ‘R’ sounds are dropped, contrary to what’s prevalent in the US; ‘car’ becomes ‘cahh’; ‘smart’ becomes ‘smahht’). The problem as I see it is that these characters they’re playing are real people, but they’re not widely known. So if Ruffalo is doing a dead-on impression of Globe reporter Mike Rezendes, that’s excellent, but I have no frame of reference for who Mike Rezendes is, acts, or speaks. All I see is the guy who was The Hulk looking agitated and quick-tempered, and not opening his mouth when he talks. John Slattery, to his credit, plays editor Ben Bradlee Jr as interchangeable from Mad Men’s Roger Sterling. But Live Schreiber plays editor-in-chief Marty Baron in a way one might very well suspect is a spookily accurate impression of him, but we – most of us – don’t have the first frame of reference for who Marty Baron is. I think the quality of the material and the importance of the subject matter did not need note-perfect impersonations of the people they were playing. Rather than enhance the authenticity of it, it underscores the fact that the material has been fictionalised for the sake of drama.

It is, despite this, a great cast, and they do pretty great work. If you can get past the fact that none of them are Bostonians and they all seem to be trying really hard to be like them who they are portraying, we have some A-grade performance here by a premier ensemble.