She Said

Director Maria Schrader brings all the visual dynamism of a made-for-YouTube deodorant commercial to this docudrama about the New York Times investigation that broke decades of silence about sexual assault in Hollywood, brought down mega-producer and serial abuser Harvey Weinstein, and helped galvanize the #Metoo movement to change American cultural attitudes about sexual abuse and workplace harassment. Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan play the reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor who juggle the dual 24/7 commitments of family life and investigative journalism careers with the help of, what is depicted as, the most understanding, supportive, and loving families and workplace. Schrader (an actress, screenwriter, and director best known in America for her Emmy-winning direction of the German Netflix drama Unorthodox) seems to think suspense is generated by staging cell phone conversations on busy streets or speaking in bullet points while nibbling on salads in spacious, well-lit eateries.      

This by-the-numbers procedural brings nothing new to a story that even a casual follower of the news in 2017 would not already be well aware of. If you are at all familiar with the names Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, you already know everything in this picture. If you are expecting to come out with new inside into the issues or a sense of what it's like to work on such an intense, high-risk, high-profile investigation, you'll be greatly disappointed. British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz (whose prior screenwriting credits include the excellent Ida, Disobedience, and Colette) churns out a script that includes at least three unforgivably on-the-nose scenes in which the movie's themes are spelt out for the audience. Worse, this is a film that aims to tackle offensive, monstrous behaviour that seems overly concerned with not upsetting anyone. Unlike Kantor and Twohey's book, which chronicles the systemic power structures that empowered Weinstein and others like him, this picture refuses to stay anything about the wider culture that enables the Weinsteins of this world to operate relatively unchecked for decades.

Schrader and Lenkiewicz seem to go out of their way to drop forgiving asides to people who worked with Weinstein like Martin Scorsese, rather than calling out or at least alluding to the powerful individuals in the industry who in hindsight have admitted that they could have and should have done more. I guess we'll have to wait for the inevitable film adaptation of Ronan Farrow's book Catch and Kill, which was based on the New Yorker journalist's concurrent reporting of this same story and identifies people like Quentin Tarantino, Ben Affleck, Lena Dunham, Colin Firth and others who clearly knew more than just rumours about their powerful, problematic boss. Catch and Kill is written like a 1970s investigative journalism thriller, so perhaps that's what we'll get from the movie version—in which case it will be yet another example of the male celebrity journalist upstaging the work of these non-famous female reporters. (Kantor and Twohey shared the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with Farrow for their collective coverage of Weinstein.)

If nothing else, docudramas like She Said provide a chance for actors to create powerhouse performances, but even here this picture comes up short. Mulligan, as usual, gets under the skin of her character, but Kazan is wildly uneven; sometimes deeply connected to the scenes she's playing and sometimes utterly at sea. Patricia Clarkson and Andre Braugher as Kantor and Twohey's higher-ups a the Times are given nothing to play and therefore deliver nothing. Most of the supporting roles of the women the reporters talk to and the representatives of the men who harassed them are also pretty forgettable except for Samantha Morton who provides what's needed in one stand-out scene. Ashley Judd, a key figure in the investigation, plays herself. Gwyneth Paltrow, whose name was always enigmatically attached to the Weinstein story, consents to lend her voice to this movie but then has an actress awkwardly stand in for her in the one scene in which she appears (a scene a better version of this movie could easily live without).

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