She Said

She Said opens with a pale young woman with cropped hair walk­ing along the Irish coast. To her aston­ish­ment an 18^th cen­tu­ry galleon is sud­den­ly revealed, bustling with navy offi­cers in tri­corn hats. She’s stum­bled onto a film set. Her awe is vio­lent­ly inter­rupt­ed with a hard cut to her run­ning full pelt down a city street strick­en with ter­ror. Noth­ing in She Said ever quite equals the sheer emo­tion­al pow­er of this pro­logue, but it builds towards a mov­ing con­clu­sion with­out ever feel­ing manipulative.

Star­ring Carey Mul­li­gan and Zoe Kazan as real New York Times inves­tiga­tive reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kan­tor, this is a clas­sic jour­nal­ism movie but one that turns its gaze to Hol­ly­wood itself. The film is a drama­ti­sa­tion of Twohey and Kantor’s book of the same name, pub­lished in 2019 and which details how they first broke the sto­ry of Har­vey Weinstein’s decades of sex­u­al abuse and the pay­outs that silenced his survivors.

With com­pas­sion and deter­mi­na­tion, the pair pur­sue a whis­per net­work of actress­es and for­mer staff who are either bound by non-dis­clo­sure agree­ments or sim­ply too trau­ma­tised to speak pub­licly. The film is large­ly com­prised of con­ver­sa­tions between these women, with Saman­tha Mor­ton as the grim­ly mat­ter-of-fact for­mer Mira­max employ­ee Zel­da Perkins and a won­der­ful Jen­nifer Ehle as Lau­ra Mad­den, an old­er incar­na­tion of the young woman in the prologue.

Kit­ty Green’s won­der­ful The Assis­tant from 2019 named no names but was clear­ly about a young woman work­ing for Wein­stein, but direc­tor Maria Schrad­er and screen­writer Rebec­ca Lenkiewicz are con­cerned with being explic­it with the real details of the inves­ti­ga­tion. Real audio record­ings of Wein­stein are played, and even key fig­ures such as Ash­ley Judd play themselves.

This gam­bit is some­times effec­tive but can be dis­tract­ing – Schrad­er asks her audi­ence to for­get that Mul­li­gan and Kazan are stars them­selves while includ­ing these ele­ments of real­ism, high­light­ing the arti­fice more than any­thing else. There’s plen­ty of the nit­ty-grit­ty detail of what it takes to pub­lish such a momen­tous sto­ry, and it’s also intrigu­ing just to see the cav­ernous inte­ri­or of the New York Times office – a fea­ture film has nev­er been shot there before. But what makes She Said dif­fer­ent to oth­er jour­nal­ism films is sim­ple but sig­nif­i­cant: Twohey and Kan­tor are work­ing moth­ers who can’t drop every­thing to chase a lead, and real life is hap­pen­ing along­side their work.

Dozens of films have been described as “#MeToo movies” but only a hand­ful have direct­ly engaged with those events. As much as there is a Hol­ly­wood sheen to She Said in its vic­to­ry-against-all-odds nar­ra­tive and in the shal­low deci­sion to age-down the char­ac­ters to fit Mul­li­gan and Kazan, it’s a sol­id recount­ing of the inves­ti­ga­tion that would irrev­o­ca­bly shake the film indus­try. The con­clu­sion is per­haps guilty of imply­ing that bring­ing down Wein­stein meant bring­ing down misog­y­ny itself, but it’s hard not to be moved when Kan­tor col­laps­es into Twohey’s arms, over­whelmed by the knowl­edge that the sur­vivors they met will final­ly have their voic­es heard.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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