Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan play the New York Times reporters who broke the Weinstein story in a movie that's taut, tense and compelling, albeit with less of a payoff than you might want. If, like me, you consider "All the President's Men" to be one of the most exciting movies ever made, it's remarkable considering that it was released in 1976, just four years after the Watergate break-in. The saga of Richard Nixon's corruption and fall had saturated the culture, but every moment in "All the President's Men" tingled with discovery. That's why it's a movie you can watch over and over again. When a big-screen journalistic drama is built around such an epic news story, it needs to give you a version of that feeling. "Spotlight," the 2015 Oscar-winning drama about The Boston Globe's exposure of child sex abuse scandals within the Catholic Church, wasn't as good as "All the President's Men," but it was also filled with a sense of discovery. It's there in how the film looked at not only the horrific behavior of abusive priests, but also the omertà of the Church.
Given that, the bar is high for "She Said," an explosive drama about the New York Times' uncovering of the Harvey Weinstein scandal in 2017. Like Watergate, the revelation of Weinstein's crimes, not just the monstrosity of a movie mogul, but the entire system of Secrecy and Denial that dominated the arena of sexual harassment and abuse in and out of Hollywood, was a story that shocked and changed the world. The reverberations of it are still being absorbed; Weinstein himself, now serving a 23-year prison sentence, hasn't even finished his trial. So you may be wondering how, exactly, "She Said" is going to capture what that story felt like before it became a story.
Director: Maria Schrader
Writers: Jodi Kantor, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Megan Twohey
Stars: Carey Mulligan, Zoe Kazan, Patricia Clarkson
The film, written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz and directed by Maria Schrader (based on the book of the same title by Times reporters Jodie Kantor and Megan Twohey), accomplishes this by tapping into something that was always an essential part of the Weinstein saga, but a I have never experienced so vividly as when I saw "She Said": the unfathomable and pervasive fear that dominated the victims of Harvey Weinstein.
The film begins in 2016, when Twohey (Carey Mulligan), an investigative reporter for the Times, gets several women to officially accuse Donald Trump (then a presidential candidate) of sexual abuse. Fear is already widespread. Trump, who calls Twohey to deny the accusations, is withering at him, and after the story is published, one of the accusers receives a bag of poop in the mail.
It's not a big jump from Trump to Weinstein. As Kantor begins to receive clues about Weinstein's harassing behavior, she gets on the phone with Rose McGowan, Weinstein's first accuser to go public, and even the furious McGowan is reluctant to participate in the story. She explains that she's been burned before, by the Times and other outlets who chased after a Weinstein exposé only to drop it.
Twohey and Kantor start working together, and what they discover, talking to former Miramax employees, is that the women there have been systematically traumatized, first by Harvey, with his litany of stalking rituals, and also by what happens afterward. . If they speak out, they will be banned from the entertainment industry; Harvey has the power to do that with a phone call. And many have been pressured into signing confidentiality agreements, meaning they will be sued if they speak out. The culture of the NDA becomes part of the system of oppression, a way of buying silence by demanding that these women sign their voices.
Beyond that, Weinstein's sense of entitlement to sexual abuse suggests that he is a man living outside the law and will therefore stop at nothing. In Ella She Said, we never see Weinstein's face, but we do hear it, on the phone and in Ambra Battilana Gutierrez's chilling real footage of her encounter with Harvey and his coercive tactics in the hotel hallway. Peninsula. And we see him from behind, a man who behaves like an ogre. Fear, and the fight against it, is a key theme of “She Said”. The film places that fear—of assault, of unemployment, of shame, of desolation, of dark cars following you at night—at the epicenter of the culture of abuse.
Following the template of "All the President's Men" and "Spotlight," "She Said" is a tense, taut, absorbing film, sticking intriguingly to the practicalities of what reporters do. When Twohey and Kantor start showing up, often unannounced, at the homes of former Miramax assistants, the look of grim terror on those women's faces speaks louder than their words. We see reporters at home, juggling work, husbands and children, and feel their deep solidarity with the women they are trying to persuade to speak out. Her accounts connect former aides, movie stars (McGowan, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ashley Judd, playing herself), as well as financial executives who oversaw payments to silence Harvey victims. We see the journalistic juggling they have to do to build a sense of collective power in these women where there has been none. (There's also the added pressure when they learn that Ronan Farrow is working on the same story at The New Yorker.) Thread by thread, Twohey and Kantor weave the story of a sinister corporate web with Harvey, the toxic spider, at its center.
In the brightly lit offices of the Times, the editors add a dash of dramatic tension: Patricia Clarkson, terse and worldly as Rebecca Corbett, who will never reveal how much she wants this story, and Andre Braugher as Dean Baquet, a born negotiator who knows how to handle a terrorist like Weinstein. Mulligan, now cunning and now explosive, and Kazan, who under the guise of Kantor's Poindexter creates a stunning X-ray of the buzzing journalistic mind, are a dynamic and, at times, moving team of expert reporter agents.
For all that works about it, though, "She Said," after its excellent first hour, doesn't turn into an electrifying payoff in the way you'd like. It's not so much that we know what's coming, but that the story no longer has a sense of complexity. Can Twohey and Kantor get one or more of Harvey's abuse survivors to come forward? Without that, they have no history. Yet somehow, in the course of waiting for that defining moment, the film begins to feel more directed, less epic than the Weinstein saga became: a prophecy of how the world had to change. "She Said" remains compelling, but ultimately the release you feel is more redux than revelation.
Watch She Said 2022 Movie Trailer
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