Greg and Zanna watch a movie about the power of journalism.
SCORES
POWER OF JOURNALISM: 5
IMPORTANCE OF JOURNALISM: 5
She Said review: Our verdict on the story of Harvey Weinstein’s downfall.
She Said.
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VALUE OF JOURNALISM: 5
SHE SAW
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I’ve read the book. I devoured it after a fairly long, children-induced, reading-for-pleasure hiatus. It was a page-turner and I was profoundly moved by the tenacity and doggedness shown by its authors – New York Times journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey – in their pursuit of the Harvey Weinstein story. If it were me, I would’ve given up after the third woman refused to go on the record - and that’s why I write film reviews.
If it wasn’t for these two women, Weinstein would still be walking around flagrantly sexually assaulting interns and hopeful actors and countless other women would have remained silent about their abusers. I admire them immensely. This is an important film, based on a more important book, that details an even more important New York Times article that led to a watershed moment in history. Is it a good film? Unfortunately, I would argue, not especially.
The thing about the journalist-gets-a-scoop genre is that its central narrative device is conversations and interviews - i.e. lots of talking, not much happening. Knowing the story as well as I did, the film felt like a long and difficult slog, which, to some extent, is because the process of breaking the Weinstein story was a long and difficult slog. But that doesn’t make for great viewing. Surprisingly, Greg – who hates most things and relishes the opportunity to regale me with his hatred of things – didn’t find the film boring at all. In fact, I think he used the word “gripping”.
But the script clearly needed another edit. There were lines of dialogue that felt like they may have been lifted directly from the book but at times – because we rarely speak how we write – it felt unnatural. Carey Mulligan is superb as Twohey, and Zoe Kazan is quite good as Kantor, but some weaker performances among the supporting cast really showed up the clunky beats in the script.
The film-maker, Maria Schrader, who made the brilliant television series Unorthodox, also faced quite a major challenge with how to portray the celebrities who play a big role in the story. Ashley Judd plays herself but people like Gwyneth Paltrow and Harvey Weinstein are conspicuously played by body doubles and shot from behind. I found it awkward and distracting.
At the media screening, the film was introduced as the first major Oscar contender. It might well be. It’s a crowd-pleaser with a rousing score that manipulates your emotions quite successfully. I cried. I may have thought the movie was too long and lacking subtlety, but I’m not dead inside.
HE SAW
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The pantheon of movies about heroic newspaper reporters taking down powerful people was for many years filled by just one movie: Watergate classic All The President’s Men. But in the last few years, it’s started filling up: Spotlight documented the Boston Globe’s reporting about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, The Post told of The Washingon Post’s publication of the Pentagon Papers, and now She Said charts The New York Times’ takedown of Weinstein.
These movies are all excellent but, more than that, they’re compelling, and a big part of the reason for that is that heroic journalists make excellent protagonists. They’re extremely relatable, being as poorly dressed as they are paid, they have to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles just to tell the truth and, eventually, they change the world.
One of the many things She Said does well is to reveal how hard journalism is, especially when confronting power, especially power unchecked by morals. In light of the number of women we now know Weinstein abused, over several decades, it’s astonishing to see how much trouble the two reporters have in first getting anyone to talk at all, then in getting those who do to talk on the record, and then in getting the vast quantities of corroboration needed to get the whole thing published.
The reporting is necessarily arduous and attritional and the movie does not shy away from showing it: Remorseless phone calls and door knocks, the building of relationships, the accumulation of documents; a slow accretion of the massive amount of evidence needed to publish a story showing what seemingly everybody in Hollywood already knew – that Weinstein was a sexual predator.
The story is told primarily in the style American newspaper journalists call a tick-tock: a chronological blow-by-blow. As a piece of cinema it’s not clever or innovative, but it doesn’t need to be because every interaction is so dramatically and emotionally loaded that you can’t look away.
This is an important movie, not just because it exposes Weinstein and the power structures that have protected and enabled him and his ilk for so long, but also because it’s possible to imagine younger viewers, not yet aware of the impossibility of surviving on a journalist’s salary, thinking it a glamorous career through which they, too, might change the world. It’s also possible to imagine viewers who might previously have denigrated the profession gaining a new respect for it and seeing it for what it is: more powerful and important than many jobs that are much more economically and culturally valued, like making movies.
She Said is in cinemas now.
