Here’s another Hollywood movie celebrating well-known journalism, think “Spotlight,” “All the Presidents Men” “The Insider,” “Ace in the Hole,” “Broadcast News,” “Network” ..
You know the drill that comes with this genre: fervent phone calls. Doors slammed. Failed sources. Blue-collar reporting. It’s an irresistible format for many in the industry and, especially, film critics.
Maria Schrader’s “She Said” tackles Harvey Weinstein. The disgraced hot-shot Producer was well-known as an aggressive predatorial figure way before The New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor “broke” the news that he was … a predatorial figure.
In the end, justice was served, the industry bowed its head down in shame, many claimed they “didn’t know”. Which leads us to Schrader’s film, it pretends to also not know that plenty of other media squashed their own Weinstein stories for years before the Trump era and pussy hats came into the picture.
Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan star as Twohey and Kantor, intensely persistent in trying to uncover the sexual abuse allegations against Weinstein. Despite constantly hitting bumps in their reporting — nobody wants to talk — they refuse to call it quits.
“She Said” is 128 minutes of Twohey and Kantor trying to find sources, and, know what? It mostly works. Rebecca Lenkiewicz wrote the screenplay based on their book, and the film does hit some rough patches by speechifying things in op-ed-like fashion; the “system” protects and enables predators, the film claims. Yeah, no kidding.
Regardless, there’s a blue-collar vibe to “She Said,” the journalists in this film never have any idea of the magnitude they will unleash to the world after they publish the piece. The Weinstein drama led to the #MeToo movement, which in itself led to the societal collapse of many men.
“She Said” never glorifies these reporters, mostly concentrating on the nuts and bolts of the case. It’s fairly gripping as it goes. The meticulous search for details is what got to me, the fervent relentless pursuit of truth, which not just The New York Times, but many other media outlets don’t always aim to achieve. Here they do. They want source to corroborate source to corroborate source and it’s at times invigorating to witness.
The Weinstein case wasn’t so black and white. You had plenty of his victims refusing to speak due to signed NDAs. Every case was different, which emotionally overwhelmed Twohey and Kantor. It doesn’t help that when they question the victims it turns more into therapy than just journalism.
Weinstein is obviously the villain of the piece and he’s, mostly, not shown on-screen, except this one instance in the third act, but I won’t ruin it for you. It’s a wise decision, the same one used by Kitty Green in her far superior “The Assistant,” which had the luxury of being more artfully opaque.
The film mentions a competing investigation by Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker, and there’s no mention of all the Hollywood bigwigs who knew about Weinstein’s actions, but remained silent. Otherwise, this is a very old-school movie. Schrader shoots her picture in very dry fashion, there’s no showy camerawork, just the story. Kazan and Mulligan are good in their respective roles and they stray away from any kind of showiness in their delivery.
That’s the thing about “She Said,” you can tell the director, actresses and crew behind this film were very passionate about bringing this story to light and it’s that passion that makes it irresistibly watchable. [B]