When it isn’t afraid to be a movie—rather than a dramatized summary of the New York Times articles about producer Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual abuse—She Said manages to acutely capture the terror and human cost of Weinstein’s reign. Unfortunately much of the film, especially at its start, plays like the purposeful paragraphs of a newspaper story: brief, succinctly arranged scenes of reporters Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) rehashing the basics of the case for the audience’s benefit, then repeatedly talking about what they’ve done and what they plan to do while their editors (played by the likes of Patricia Clarkson and Andre Braugher) nod along. It’s only when She Said opens up to consider Twohey and Kantor’s home lives, as well as the ruined lives of the Weinstein victims they interview, that the film exhibits some vigor. Especially good are Samantha Morton and Jennifer Ehle as former Weinstein assistants, daring to share their stories yet again, even after they’d long given up on any hope for justice. And while there are few filmmaking flourishes from director Maria Schrader (a sequence in which recorded audio from a Weinstein encounter plays over a tracking shot down an empty hotel corridor stands out as shockingly experimental), she intentionally sets many scenes against backdrops that emphasize the other aspects of these women’s lives: Kantor taking a call while making her kids’ school lunches; Twohey grabbing onto the assignment as a life raft while in the throes of postpartum depression; Ehle’s former assistant deciding to share her story moments before undergoing a mastectomy. Even as these women are dealing with the psychic weight of Weinstein, the challenges of everyday life—and a patriarchically structured reality—demand they also have to deal with something else.
(11/15/2022)
