She Said Review: An Artless Chronicle of a Watershed Moment for the #MeToo Movement

Simultaneously under-dramatized and overwrought, Maria Schrader’s She Said is crushed under the weight of its own self-importance. A maddeningly rote depiction of what would seem on its face to be a bracing true-life tale, the film chronicles New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) and Megan Twohey’s (Carey Mulligan) efforts to break the story of Hollywood honcho Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual harassment and abuse, and it does so with all the wit, drama, and propulsive energy of a technical manual.

Adapted from Kantor and Twohey’s account of their Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation, She Said is modeled as a kind of gender-swapped version of All the President’s Men, with Kantor—short, mousy, and Jewish—playing the Carl Bernstein to tall, casually glamorous Twohey’s Bob Woodward. Elsewhere, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet (Andre Braugher) and enterprise editor Rebecca Corbett (Patricia Clarkson) serve as joint Ben Bradlees, while the largely unseen Weinstein (Mike Houston) is the Nixonian specter looming over every scene.

But where All the President’s Men wrings plenty of tense, gradually accumulating anxiety out of the mundanities of shoe-leather reporting, She Said seems less intent on dramatizing the events of Kantor and Twohey’s investigation than simply relating them. As a result, Schrader’s film often plays as little more than a collection of disconnected tidbits. Kantor and Twohey call a lot of people on the phone, occasionally meet a source for tea, and show up on an unsuspecting Weinstein crony’s doorstep, but Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s script offers little sense of how all of these various parties fit together into the larger edifice of Weinstein’s cover-up operation.

The film is so busy underlining this case’s importance to do the more difficult procedural work of elucidating how Weinstein was able to get away with his crimes for so long. “This is bigger than Weinstein. This is about the system protecting abusers,” says Zelda Perkins (Samantha Morton), a former Miramax employee who served as a key source for Kantor and Twohey’s story. And yet, that system remains, for the most part, frustratingly opaque. We learn a little about Weinstein’s method of buying his victims’ silence with expensive settlements and using non-disclosure agreements as a secret weapon against them. However, Weinstein’s network of enablers—including the high-powered actors and directors who knew what was going on and looked the other way—get what’s essentially a free pass, remaining largely unmentioned.

Though Schrader’s previous work, like Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe, has shown her to be a skilled and nuanced cartographer of the intricacies of human interaction, here her characters often feel more robotic than the android at the center of her wry sci-fi rom-com I’m Your Man. That’s thanks in large part to Lenkiewicz’s stilted dialogue, and the problem is exacerbated by Schrader’s staging and shot composition, which are perfunctory to the point of indifference.

She Said’s direction is flavorless and unsure of itself, adopting conflicting strategies that tend to cancel each other out. For one, Nicholas Britell’s mawkish score frequently undercuts the film’s detached rendering of Kantor and Twohey’s investigation, and while the filmmakers keep us rigorously close to their main characters’ perspectives for the lion’s share of the film, they have a tendency of resorting to flashbacks as Kantor and Twohey’s sources tell their tales of abuse, cutting away from journalist and source at the very moments when the relationship between the two is at its most intimate and compelling. Schrader wisely resists reenacting the abuse these women endured, but the flashbacks only underscore She Said’s fundamental dissonance: that for a film about women reporting their abuse, its exasperatingly vague about why and how they make the decision to risk significant legal and reputational harm to do so.

Throughout She Said, Schrader and Lenkiewicz want to make sure that viewers know that speaking out against sexual abuse is important and commendable—and, of course, it is—but their film does little to help us to grasp the torrid, conflicting emotions embedded in that fateful decision to say something. We see plenty of women tell their stories in Schrader’s film, but the process and struggle that leads these victims and witnesses to finally come forward and speak on the record is almost completely elided. Ultimately, She Said is more concerned with eliciting the audience’s admiration than its understanding, its compassion, or even simply its interest.