In October 2017, after years of conspicuous prime-time wisecracks about that smarmy, skeezy Harvey Weinstein, The New York Times published the first of many accounts suggesting the full extent of how badly, and criminally, the Oscar-winning movie producer had preyed on women for decades.
Crucially, it also detailed the lengths to which Weinstein’s company, Miramax, threw money at several of the women, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars in discreet settlements. The payouts and nondisclosure agreements muzzled the victims and smoothed the Miramax path back to business as usual, however Harvey and his brother, Bob, chose to define it. “She Said” examines that business and the protection racket underneath.
Based on the Times stories and the 2019 book of the same title, screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz dramatizes how reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, played by Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan, got that story. The results under Maria Schrader’s cool, forceful direction are nearly as effective as “Spotlight,” to name the recent high-water mark in the journalism procedural genre.
I hoped for a movie relatively free of Hollywood hogwash and melodramatics, and got it. What I didn’t expect was the calm brilliance of scenes such as Jennifer Ehle and Samantha Morton, playing two of Weinstein’s 1990s targets, telling their stories so truthfully, with such economical emotional punch, that it’s both heartbreaking and enough to make you seethe.
We meet one of those women at the start of “She Said,” in a 1992-set prologue. Somewhere in Ireland, a young woman walks her dog through the woods near the seashore. She spies what seems like a mirage: men in ancient military uniforms on the beach, near a sailing ship. Then she, and we, see the film crew off to one side. They’re making a movie.
Soon enough the woman, Laura Madden, played by Ehle as an adult, finds her way into the movie business, and eventually into the orbit of Weinstein. She reenters “She Said” much later, a while after we’ve been following reporters Kantor and Twohey on their separate Times assignments. Eventually they team up for the Weinstein story they suspect might exemplify Hollywood’s long-established pattern of sexual exploitation.
In short, swift strokes we see Kantor juggling parenthood and newsgathering, intercut with Twohey and her newborn. Before the Weinstein story the women weren’t longtime friends or, we gather, especially close colleagues. “She Said” is all the better for their initially guarded mutual respect.
Working with editor Rebecca Corbett (Patricia Clarkson, subtly perfect) and executive editor Dean Baquet(Andre Braugher, equally subtle), the reporters meet evasion and resistance on the hunt for documents and eyewitnesses or firsthand, on-the-record accounts. Some of Weinstein’s starriest sexual targets included Gwyneth Paltrow (not depicted on screen) and Ashley Judd, who is on screen in “She Said,” as herself. We hear actor and fellow target Rose McGowan in phone calls with Kantor; already McGowan had gone public via Twitter about a Sundance Film Festival encounter with Weinstein, though she declined to name him.
The movie builds its scenes and the reporters’ progress with care, downplaying some elements while streamlining or stressing others. For once — and this it has in common with “Spotlight” — the brief glimpses of the reporters’ home lives don’t hijack the narrative. What we see is there for a reason: This was hard, preoccupying work, and Kantor and Twohey were so rarely not thinking about it, whatever they were doing. In “She Said” the active, constant demands of parenting are ever-present, and never amped up for attention: Here’s Kazan as Kantor on the phone, while making lunch for one of her girls, and there’s Mulligan as Twohey, at home, the walls closing in as she struggles against postpartum depression. In the opening 2016 Manhattan street footage, director Schrader includes glimpses of a woman, eyes downcast, and a quick shot of the “don’t walk” red hand signal. How many survivors do we share the streets with, every day?
Much later, Twohey, Kantor and editor Corbett are huddling over the story in a restaurant, and Twohey’s hit on by a couple of male customers. It turns ugly and threatening, fast, and the force with which Mulligan shuts it down is stinging and exactly right. After Twohey’s investigation (early in the movie, and briefly) of Donald Trump, she fields threats of rape and murder. Anyone who has worked with female journalists of any profile likely know the awful truth of the matter: This is nothing out of the ordinary. “She Said” is, at heart, about behavior — Weinstein’s, but millions of others’ — that has been dismissed as locker room talk or “workplace sexual tension” or legally defensible gray areas long enough.
A few quibbles. The music is by an excellent composer, Nicholas Britell (”Moonlight,” “If Beale Street Could Talk”), but here the scoring often crowds the action and our emotional engagement. (There’s a lot of it, in other words.) Screenwriter Lenkiewicz (”Ida,” “Colette”) isn’t always entirely clear about the precise roles in the Weinstein scandal certain players are playing.
Small matters. The movie interpolates its flashbacks with unusual grace, while confining the action to a couple of years of momentous effort. The book “She Said” continues long after Weinstein’s career was over, to include the saga of how U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh sidestepped accusations of assault, through rageful tears of indignation. Trump, of course, ran the country for a while, despite multiple accusations of assault and harassment, and he’s running to run it again. The downfall of Weinstein changed a lot, if “a lot” can serve as a trick synonym for “not enough.”
The movie is artfully balanced between its leads, and both Mulligan and Kazan excel. Kazan has the edge as well as the more far-flung story arc, and she creates a hugely empathetic portrayal full of tiny, telling, transitional moments of doubt, purpose and resolve. Director Schrader’s handling of “She Said” blows straight past the smugness and pretty fabrications of a movie like “Bombshell” (about Megyn Kelly and Fox News predator Roger Ailes) and lands in a select list of journalism movies, where “Spotlight,” “All the President’s Men” and too few others reside.
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‘SHE SAID’
3.5 stars (out of 4)
MPAA rating: R (for language and descriptions of sexual assault)
Running time: 2:08
How to watch: In theaters Friday
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