She Said (2022)
Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) closing in on Harvey Weinstein
The most useful way to begin talking about this movie is to point out how it’s not being talked about.
It focuses like a laser on the sexual abuse committed by Harvey Weinstein during his long career as a highly successful Hollywood producer and, for at least 20 years, a titan on the movie awards circuit.
Powerful as Weinstein became, his transgressions eventually caught up with him. Dozens of women have come forward in recent years to expose his vileness, and the #MeToo movement has blossomed in Hollywood and elsewhere.
But #MeToo hasn’t exactly triumphed. As far as I know, no one in Hollywood or anywhere else has suggested that powerful men have ceased taking advantage of those vulnerable to their abuse.
Yes, it’s heartening that on Rotten Tomatoes She Said currently enjoys an 87% approval from critics and a 91% approval from audiences.
But it’s barely being talked about for awards this season. Its eye-opening depiction of the New York Times reporters who, in 2017, first brought Weinstein to account is receiving little more than polite acknowledgement from movie insiders and pundits. And it’s done poorly at the box office.
That almost feels like another outrage, because She Said bristles with what I can only call a beautiful disgust. It reveals woman after woman bullied, threatened, cowed and worse, some for decades, by Weinstein with the tacit acceptance, and sometimes complicity, of his handlers.
The movie takes us inside the crusade of two New York Times investigative reporters determined to expose Weinstein’s ugly secrets. Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) and Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) worked tirelessly to convince some victims to go on the record. Both journalists had rich personal lives but kept digging and cracked the case.
The movie escalates like a thriller and it’s also a great journalistic story. And what’s most remarkable here is that it’s told vividly, with harrowing moments shown, but entirely without sensationalism.
When Kantor is assigned the story, from the start her efforts are stymied. The abused women she speaks to refuse to let her write about details of their mistreatment.
Nearly all had signed non-disclosure agreements, NDAs, so they could have been sued if they spoke publicly. How could Kantor report on what no one was willing to go on the record to expose?
Slowly, though, Kantor fathoms the depth of these women’s fears. They’ve understood for years that Weinstein had a relentless system of terrorizing accusers. He bent his minions, including feckless lawyers, to sharpen and intensify his browbeating and “defenses”.
But all of this scrupulous work in front of and behind the camera still may not be getting its due. This smartly cast story of angst, struggle and vicious male entitlement deserves more attention and respect than it’s received so far from Hollywood.
His intimidation worked. Nearly all the women, when their complaints of Harvey were listened to at all by his company, Miramax, were coerced into signing NDAs and paid off. They were ordered not to reveal what they’d endured even to spouses, friends or doctors, let alone to the press or anyone in the movie industry.
We hear tales of Weinstein luring young – they were nearly always young – women to his home, office or hotel room, disrobing, trying to lure them into showers or demanding that they give him massages, promising not to hurt them as he pressed his body against them, threatening their professional futures if they didn’t give in to him.
But almost nothing is “re-enacted” on screen. The movie ingeniously tells us what it discreetly declines to show us.
Why would you leave Harvey? the victims kept being asked by potential employers, and of course they could never say the real reason.
But the wall began to show cracks. Zelda (Samantha Morton), a one-time assistant at Miramax, having left the movie industry and gone into training horses, has nothing left to lose, so she provides Kantor with written details of how Miramax silenced anyone who complained about Harvey.
Rowena (Angela Yeoh), who worked in Miramax’s Hong Kong office as a young woman, more than two decades later, overcoming her shame, finally agrees to spell out Harvey’s grossness.
Perhaps most resonantly, Laura (Jennifer Ehle, in a stinging performance), the youngest of all the victims, raped by Harvey at age 16, comes forward more than 25 years later. She never signed an NDA, so she’s willing to go on the record to the Times.
Laura (Jennifer Ehle, c.) comes forward after more than 25 years to name Weinstein
What ends up clinching the paper’s expose, giving it a shot of real glamor, is the coming forward of singer-actress Ashley Judd (here playing herself). Judd tells the Times team that when she refused Harvey’s advances, she found herself denied parts and questioned about how Harvey could possibly have wronged her.
For years she mostly declined to talk, but at Kantor’s repeated urging she decides it’s time to tell the world the truth. Judd’s agreement to go on the record literally brings Kantor to tears. And helps reassure the Times’ editors, including executive editor Dean Baquet (Andre Braugher), that the paper is ready to run the story.
Run it they do. The #MeToo movement is born. Harvey, we learn on screen at the movie’s close, has been convicted, is serving time, and is due to face further justice in New York and London. No less than 84 women have come forward to testify about Weinstein’s abuse since the Times ran the expose.
Even more movingly, the deep down, lived-in pain of these victims is recreated by all the actresses with humble authority and an aching sympathy.
And even for pros at the Times, reporting the story cross-country and in Europe takes its toll. Mulligan in the role of Twohey is delicate but searing in showing how the mixed emotions of new motherhood and covering monstrous male behavior can give rise to despondency and repressed rage.
That seething anger erupts like lava in a restaurant scene when Twohey and two women colleagues are crudely approached with sexual come-ons by male patrons.
Twohey’s explosion at the men is a badly needed reminder that male piggishness isn’t confined to the powerful, and that women every day can confront it in unexpected ways.
Kazan as Kantor gives a carefully scaled performance starting with an unawareness that slowly curdles into fury.
She hears from woman after woman about the way their earliest hopes were betrayed, the shame they couldn’t help feeling, and the smoldering indignity it seemed they’d never see redressed.
Kazan’s growing, increasingly wide-eyed horror and dismay elevate the performance into a kind of one-woman screed against the wrong she’s reporting.
The screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz (working from Twohey and Kantor’s book She Said) and the director Maria Schrader have done controlled, low-key yet powerful work documenting emotions that are still coursing through society, most definitely including the entertainment industry.
The Times’ team takes a final look before clicking the button to Publish the damning story
But all of this scrupulous work in front of and behind the camera still may not be getting its due. This smartly cast story of angst, struggle and vicious male entitlement deserves more attention and respect than it’s received so far from Hollywood.
The accomplishment here needs to be singled out, as similar work has been lauded in the past. For instance, to its immense credit, in 2015 the Motion Picture Academy gave its Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay Oscars to Spotlight, which detailed the Boston Globe’s exposure of decades of priestly abuse of children in that city’s Archdiocese.
For all that movie’s shocking revelations, was there other child abuse by priests in the nation and around the world still to be uncovered? Without a doubt.
Last month, the Times reported that Maryland’s attorney general announced that over the last 80 years Catholic priests in the Archdiocese of Baltimore abused more than 600 children. And that’s in only one of three Archdioceses in the state.
Attorneys general in 20 more states have launched similar investigations. What they’ll find can only be imagined.
So, of course movies can’t expose all transgressions, much less put a stop to them. But they can do vital work in dramatizing the toll that abuse takes.
She Said isn’t my favorite movie of 2022. So far, that’s still All Quiet on the Western Front, from Germany (MovieStruck 11/06/22).
But it’s unquestionably one of the best movies of the year, and one that movie industry leaders, of all people, should be championing. The fight against male entitlement is far from finished. The cost of it we see dramatized here can’t be diminished as passe, trite, or, worst of all, fully tallied.
Movies this important, this skillfully and ardently crafted, should be rewarded and talked about. The relatively mild response She Said is receiving so far in Hollywood is in itself disquieting. It feels like another turning away. Someone somewhere is paying for that silence.
I appreciate how Spotlight shed light on the child abuse issue among priests in a way that caught my interest (through a great movie). I’m now interested in seeing how She Said sheds light on the female abuse issue among men in positions of power. Thanks for the push here. Skillful words.