She Said

One of the biggest stories in journalism this century, the Harvey Weinstein scandal has been crying out for cinematic treatment on the scale of Spotlight or The Post. With a strong cast and no shortage of ambition, Maria Schrader’s film, based on the book by Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor about their investigation, is undeniably important, but slow pacing and leaden dialogue keep it from achieving its potential. It lacks the energy and precision vital to any journalistic investigation, and especially to one taking place under this kind of pressure.

Twohey is played here by Carey Mulligan; viewers won’t need the scene set in an almost identical nightclub to get flashbacks to Promising Young Woman, her previous self-sabotaging tale of a woman taking on abusers. Zoe Kazan, veteran of two investigation-focused TV series, takes the role of Kantor. She is positioned as the newcomer, self-conscious and a little shy but with the sweetness needed to coax traumatised women into speaking out. The two look out for each other, and are watched over by colleagues, with an unreserved supportiveness which may have its roots in truth but feels Utopian. This may be the world feminism tried to build but onscreen a little more complexity would be a lot more interesting.

There are no acknowledged grey areas in this film, despite the rather obvious ethical challenges which the story brought up in real life. Do the women coming forward publicly really know what they’re getting into? One informs the New York Times team that she’s just heading into surgery before giving consent for them to use her name, which, given that she’s in England, almost certainly means that she’s under the influence of benzodiazepine; nobody bats an eyelid. The only scenes in which viewers might need to exercise their brains are those involving lawyers, as if journalism were always simple and pure.

These faults aside, the film does a fairly good job of working through the basics of how the story came together, approaching it in linear fashion. There is an obvious effort to pay tribute to the reporters and to the women who shared their stories, with both the cinematography and the score positioning them as heroic in traditional Hollywood style – something which few people would dispute, even if it does feel rather heavy-handed. Scenes addressing Twohey and Kantor’s home lives remind us that they’re human beings who had day to day life issues to cope with at the same time as doing all this, and acknowledge the support which they received from their families.

There cannot be many people unfamiliar with the Weinstein story. It is approached here with sensitivity, the film doing its best not to be exploitative and never to risk titillating viewers. The face of the actor playing Weinstein is never shown, which will make the film easier to watch for people who found that the story brought back their own trauma, and which also serves to emphasise that his experiences and perspectives are not what’s important here. He has had ample opportunity to speak. Now it is the turn of those he harmed. Even if you’ve read some of their testimony before, you may find that its delivery (often verbatim) by actors has a stronger emotional effect. There are some very good supporting performances here.

Why tell the story again at this point? There are a lot of references, early on, to the fact that Weinstein was only one man in a system which advantaged abusers and made it very difficult for their victims to seek redress. At the end of the film we are reminded what happened to Weinstein but there is no real reckoning with this system. A paragraph stating that many companies made adjustments to their working practices doesn’t really feel adequate, especially in light of the fact that actors frequently report that these abuses are still happening. One is left with an uncomfortable sense of this being brushed under the carpet. Yes, the monster has been defeated, but we know how Hollywood works, and we know there’ll be a sequel. It’s worth celebrating heroes, but we need to be wary of happily ever after endings which make it all to easy to go back to looking the other way.