She Said: How #MeToo Was Born, and Weinstein Bagged, Amid the Tedium of Reporting

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B

Movies like Spotlight, and its more contemporary offspring She Said, serve an important function in a “fake news” world, where journalism is often confused with punditry. One is work. The other is ego stroking.

Reporting isn’t glamourous. A good day as a reporter is when somebody, anybody, returns your call, or your email, or doesn’t slam a door in your face when you turn up at their home uninvited.

And the tedium of true reporting is the tale of She Said, the story of the once-unimaginable takedown of Hollywood power-producer and sexual predator Harvey Weinstein.

Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan give editors Andre Braugher and Patricia Clarkson a Harvey-hunt update

Weinstein’s is a hideous story of a sociopath granted the immunity of silence and fear. But portraying his fall luridly and sensationally would be inappropriate and disrespectful to the victims. We hear in detail what Weinstein did. It’s just as well not to see it depicted.

Instead, the film by Maria Schrader (whose last work was the wry sci-fi film I’m Your Man) is a story of stubbornness, of two New York Times reporters (played by Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan) who have enough off-the-record dirt on Weinstein from famous actresses (including Gwyneth Paltrow, Rose McGowan and Ashley Judd) that they know there’s a story there. Unfortunately, off-the-record is like a verbal contract. It isn’t worth the paper it’s not printed on.

And though, eventually, more than 80 women would come forward with their testimony, She Said is a story about Megan Twohey (Mulligan) and Jodi Kantor (Kazan) who couldn’t get anybody to talk to them at all. “Just one woman!” Kantor begs the gods when she comes up empty yet again.

Meanwhile their patient editors, Dean Baquet (Andre Braugher) and Rebecca Corbett (Patricia Clarkson) gave them carte blanche to book planes and hotels and fly from California to England. (At the press screening I attended, there were chuckles from the budget-strapped journos in the audience every time the brass threw more cash at the story. It was only five years ago, but in news resource terms, it might as well be five thousand).

Seen through the eyes of the two reporters, She Said is practically told third-hand. McGowan and Paltrow are just voices on the phone or shot using a body double from behind. Only Judd appears on camera, since she was the one to finally put her career on the line and go on the record.

Same for Weinstein. A sound-alike shows up on threatening conference calls, and we do, eventually, from behind, see a lumpen figure show up at the Times newsroom to do his threatening in person.

In the last act, urgency is added to the mix when the Times reporters hear that Rowan Farrow is on the case, writing a piece about Weinstein for the New Yorker magazine.

That actually happened. And it tends to undercut the notion that, but for the work of Twohey and Kantor, Weinstein might have never been indicted (he is currently in prison and awaiting addition trials).

Despite the lack of on-the-record interviews, there was obviously a lot of smoke surrounding the Miramax founder. We see erstwhile Weinstein lawyers and executives begin to crack, presumably under the pressure of their consciences, and drop cryptic clues that lead the two women to the truth.

It may be that #MeToo was bound to happen no matter who broke open Weinstein’s case. But there are no certainties. She Said is about cracking the code of silence, and the flood that follows when it breaks.

She Said. Directed by Maria Schrader. Starring Carey Mulligan, Zoe Kazan, Andre Braugher and Patricia Clarkson. Opens in theatres, Friday, Nov. 18.