She Said - Movie Review

Critics Score - 7 of 10

General Audience Score - 8 of 10

I feel like before I begin this review I must make a few things clear. Harvey Weinstein is a scumbag who deserves to be locked up and the key thrown into the ocean, along with any other men that use their power to prey on others. But my feelings on that type of men is completely separate from my efforts as a film critic to dissect a movie and critique it on how it works as a piece of art and entertainment. With that disclaimer aside, in just a couple weeks the new film She Said will drop into theatres, a movie about the journalists that helped to break open the case and reported the accusations against Harvey Weinstein that eventually and thankfully got him thrown in jail. While the lead performances from Kazan and Mulligan that play the journalists are perfectly serviceable, the movie just isn’t quite as good, especially when compared to other recent movies like Spotlight or Collective. Of course not only do some of these movies tell really compelling stories, like the Weinstein scandal, but they tell them in a compelling and fluid way that builds drama, suspense and then pays it off with a satisfying finale. While cinephiles, critics and hardcore film buffs may find some fault in the storytelling aspects, there’s still a solid and interesting foundation of a film here. Despite it’s falters along the way, it is certainly good for what it is and I’d encourage anyone to not get too caught up in the He Said and check out She Said.

SYNOPSIS - We sink our teeth into our journalist’s tale with some sequences and audio of the 2016 election surrounding Trump running for and being inaugurated as President. But then the movie starts where is actually should, with a short-haired blonde woman walking her dog through the woods. The on screen text informs us we’re in Ireland in 1992, she comes out of the woods and onto the set of a movie that’s shooting a civil war reenactment from what I can gather. Before long some of the film crew waves her over to help them and then we see her working and training as an assistant on the film, but then the scene cuts and we skip to sometime later on, the same woman is disheveled and running down a street crying, we can only guess as to what happened. We jump back to New York in 2016 and are introduced first to Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan), who’s pregnant with her first child, we watch as she’s typing “he kissed me on the neck” and then we discover the article is supposed to be coming out in regards former President Trump. As Megan pushes forward with publishing this story, not the story we’re actually here to talk about, we hear clips of Trump speaking about grabbing women which he dismisses as “locker room talk”. The film contextualizes these and other events that surrounded what we know today as sort of the beginning of the #MeToo movement. 

This intro was all pretty unnecessary as everyone watching is aware of the movement and the approximate timeframe it began, in any case the film unnecessarily drags this out for over ten minutes. It holds us by the hand to establish these characters, as if we won’t figure out by the end that these women are both determined and courageous journalists that are hell bent on telling the truth and exposing wrongdoing. Then we meet Jodi Cantor (Zoe Kazan) who begins to hear of accusations by actress Rose McGowan of sexual misconduct in Hollywood. In a phone conversation we hear, “Thomas says it’s Harvey Weinstein”. Before long Jodi and Megan are working together on the case, the screenplay insists on them making phone call after phone call to investigate and break the story open. One conversation towards the end was particularly annoying, it felt like it was almost specifically designed to try and sell the audience of the importance of what was happening and create drama. But Mulligan and Kazan are both great, they both come at this story as mothers, we see their personal lives and how that intersects with their jobs and work as investigative journalists that go after high profile men accused of misconduct. But many parts of the story are familiar to those reading this, so I won’t bore you with the details of the film’s events.

A few of the issues that I have with the film I lay at the feet of the Director, Maria Schrader. While some of the individual sequences are well directed, the way they’re compiled and ultimately assembled left something to be desired. Right smack in the middle of the film is a great sequence, it features an audio recording of Weinstein and equally powerful, emotional and appalling. But it was also so confusing as to why this was dropped dead in the center of the film and not held towards the ending to build up some emotional momentum and get us reinvested right when the film will pay it off. These choices also gave the film an uneven feel, it didn’t progress naturally and fluidly like Spotlight, it came through as jerky. As I alluded to, there are so many phone calls in the movie. It feels like a big, long Apple commercial, if you played a game where you did a shot every time the Apple logo is seen, you’d be wasted pretty quick. Some of the phone calls could’ve been eliminated and the information given to us via another outlet. Also, the editing was a problem. That first act could’ve been condensed, I already mentioned the section about Trump, but the film in general dragged out too much. Fifteen to twenty minutes could’ve been easily trimmed off the over two hour runtime to create a better pacing for the film and amped up the drama. The original score was well composed, the violin and piano working overtime to try and sell the tension the film is struggling to create despite it tripping over it’s own shoelaces at times. Despite my issues with the filmmaking and storytelling present here, She Said is a good movie and the story is an important one that deserved to be told, I just think some aspects of it could’ve been handled better.

SUMMARY - Most general audiences will respond kindly to this film, it’s a good movie, it presents a lot of information, much of which some may already know, but the subject matter is so heavy that it’s easy to get people to be passionate about it. While it fails to reach the heights of some other journalism films, it may even struggle to get a Best Picture nomination, but there’s still a good movie and an even more important message here that we should all get behind. If we will only listen to what She Said.