She Said
New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor break one of the most important stories in a generation — a story that helped launch the #MeToo movement and shattered decades of silence around the subject of sexual assault in Hollywood.
- Released: 2022-11-17
- Runtime: 129 minutes
- Genre: Drama
- Stars: Zoe Kazan, Carey Mulligan, Patricia Clarkson, Andre Braugher, Jennifer Ehle, Samantha Morton, Angela Yeoh, Tom Pelphrey, Adam Shapiro, Maren Heary, Sean Cullen, Anastasia Barzee, Keilly McQuail, Hilary Greer, Tina WongLu, Nancy Ellen Shore, Wesley Holloway, Stephen Dexter, Ruby Thomas, Emma Clare O'Connor, Brad Neilley, Stephanie Heitman, Jason Hewitt, Sujata Eyrick, Justine Colan, Steven Bitterman, Liam Edwards, Norah Feliciano, Kareemeh Odeh, Anita Sabherwal, Kelly Rian Sanson, Lauren Yaffe, George Walsh, Dalya Knapp, Maren Lord, Elle Graham
- Director: Maria Schrader
Comments
- DrDumb - 5 June 2024
Great plot about sex exploitation in film industry
I've read many news about sex exploitation in Hollywood and film industry so I wasn't very surprised by the plot the movie presented. The movie is leaving my streaming platform so I took the last chance to watch it before it's gone for good. Sexual harassment, settlements, altering evidence, victims refusal to provide evidence, verbal threats or physical threats to investigators, defamation, overwhelming difficulties to collect evidence and etc. You will see all these in this movie. The movie should have provided us the hearing process of Harvey Weinstein in the court and how he was convicted and sentenced. The movie spent too much time on contacting the victims and collecting the evidence so it took me 2 hours to finish, could have made it shorter.
Overall it was worth it to watch. - RMurray847 - 14 November 2023
Solid and well-acted, but not all it could have been
There is a great deal to admire in SHE SAID. The cast is uniformly terrific, the story is compelling, and it moves at a brisk clip. Yet somehow it falls short of being excellent, and is merely admirable.
Experienced, even jaded New York Times reporter Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) teams up with the more naïve Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) in an effort to expose the horrendous sexual abuse imposed by film mogul Harvey Weinstein on many women in his circles over several decades. Apparently an "open secret" in Hollywood, the reporters find massive difficulties in getting anyone on record with their accusations. The movie focuses on three primary aspects. 1) The investigation itself. Tracking down leads. Interviewing them. (And in the film, often recreating parts of the incidents being described.) We hear from movie stars and minor assistants alike. Weinstein's swath of destruction was an equal opportunity one...any woman who caught his eye was potentially a victim of his seemingly endless hunger to abuse. 2) The legal machinations of the head honchos at the times (Patricia Clarkson, Andre Braugher and more). Their mission was to ensure Weinstein and his team had time to respond to the story, but without revealing sources or putting the newspaper at risk. And 3) the impact of the work on the homelives of the two reporters, both of whose marriages are strained by the long hours, the tension and the travel.
The first part aspect of the film is by far the most compelling, which is unsurprising. The stories these women tell, particularly as presented by some fantastic performers such as Jennifer Ehle, are the heart of the film. The impact on the victims of retelling their stories and the impact on the reporters who hear them make for the most emotional part of the film by far. Kazan, in particular, makes a terrific stand-in for the viewer. Her inexperience shows, but so does her shock. She is not yet jaded. Mulligan's character already went through a demoralizing experience exposing the harassment of Donald Trump prior to his first campaign, only to see him elected nonetheless. But even she can be thrilled by the prospect of bringing down a powerful monster. (I must say, as a sidebar, that it was just weird having Ashley Judd play herself in this film. No one else was played by themselves; therefore, it was distracting and diminished the power of Judd's story, strangely.)
The second section is only intellectually interesting. The legal machinations. The hair-splitting. Unfortunately, these plot points are heavily at the end of the film, and they let the emotional air out of the film to a large degree. It feels like a briskly paced episode of Law & Order at the end, rather than the climax of a carefully constructed, important film. Everyone is great in it, and there is inherent drama...but it doesn't pack a wallop for the heart.
The third section, while well done, feels familiar. Too many past movies have shown how investigations can weigh on families. SHE SAID brings nothing new to the table, despite an nice performance from child actor Dalya Knapp, who is so good in the TV series Evil.
In the end, the movie felt a little bit more like a homework assignment than it should have. I admired it. I loved the cast. The story is very interesting. But it needlessly emptied it's own emotional bank account by the end, getting hung up on the details and not really giving us a clear cut moment of triumph and payoff.
