‘She Said’ review: Lean newsroom drama chronicles #MeToo investigation
Approaching the heels of Donald Trump’s election, these articles sparked a world motion of comparable investigations, reckonings and requires systemic change. Weinstein was convicted of rape and sexual assault in New York in 2020; he’s presently on trial in Los Angeles and faces related fees in London.
With the outcomes already so well-known, the worth of an on-screen dramatization could be questionable. However “She Stated,” tailored from Twohey and Kantor’s ebook of the identical identify by screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz and director Maria Schrader, offers an engrossing, even galvanizing reply. At their finest, display screen variations of latest occasions can inscribe broadly recognized information on a deeper, extra emotional degree; they make the stakes increased and in any other case distant or summary ideas extra granular and human. “She Stated” takes a narrative we thought we knew and offers it new, completely shattering life.
Schrader takes a web page from the good journalism motion pictures — most notably “All of the President’s Males” and, extra lately, “Highlight” — by paring down the narrative to its leanest, most unfussy parts. “She Stated” begins with a intelligent misdirect, with Twohey, performed with whippetlike depth by Carey Mulligan, seeming to be speaking about Weinstein when actually the topic is Trump, who because the film opens is a presidential candidate. A number of months later, Twohey is the mom of a child woman; Kantor, performed with mild soulfulness by Zoe Kazan, is balancing a cozily messy household life along with her subsequent large story — on this case, an investigation of office sexual misconduct. Rumor has it that Miramax, based by Weinstein and his brother, Bob, has at all times been a treacherous place for girls. She begins to make some calls to see if anybody may go on the file.
What ensues is a simple if not essentially pulse-pounding how-we-got-that-story chase, with Twohey and Kantor finally teaming up and dealing with their exacting, unflappable editor Rebecca Corbett (performed by the equally exacting, unflappable Patricia Clarkson, who amongst different virtues will get Corbett’s famously fabulous hair precisely proper). Instances Government Editor Dean Baquet might not bear the slightest resemblance to actor Andre Braugher, however Braugher brings the thunder in understated, satisfying methods, particularly when he’s going toe-to-toe with Weinstein and his authorized group; just like the classics it evokes, “She Stated” properly retains its villain principally off-screen, the extra successfully to play up his menacing sense of omnipotence in Manhattan’s greedy media tradition. (The verisimilitude is heightened by Schrader’s option to movie within the Instances’s real-life newsroom, with its pops of pink and quiet, hivelike hum.)
The cat-and-mouse recreation of doing battle with one of many movie enterprise’s most infamous knife fighters would have made for a suitably intriguing film. However the energy of “She Stated” lies in its moments of potent ethical readability, which arrive in revelatory set items. A scene involving a former Miramax worker, portrayed with breathtaking vulnerability and metal by Samantha Morton, qualifies as “She Stated’s” bookkeeper scene, recalling the gemlike sequence in “All of the President’s Males” that includes Jane Alexander as a brave, unwittingly pivotal supply.
Simply as shifting is Ashley Judd, who went on the file for Twohey and Kantor at an important turning level, and who performs herself right here in an electrifying efficiency of grace and grit, and Jennifer Ehle, who lends her distinctive heat and dignity to her function as a onetime Miramax government who accuses Weinstein of assaulting her as a 22-year-old, including that he “took my voice … simply as I used to be about to begin discovering it.” Schrader movies “She Stated” with a bracing mixture of straightforwardness and sensitivity, staging probably the most prurient particulars of Weinstein’s instances with somber restraint slightly than salacious literalism.
Mulligan, enjoying one other avenging angel after her function as a fearless feminist vigilante in “Promising Younger Girl,” and Kazan every have their moments as nicely, when the enormity of what they’re attempting to reveal — the centuries of girls reflexively being anticipated to tolerate all method of abuse, condescension, violence and garden-variety BS, after which blaming themselves for having endured it — comes crashing into them at random however flattening moments. “She Stated” tells an absorbing story, however extra importantly it makes the undercurrents of that story legible and relatable, proper up via the tense remaining moments earlier than a journalist clicks “Publish.” The instruments of the commerce was typewriters and telexes, however the thrill is simply the identical. So is the phobia. “She Stated” has earned its place within the pantheon of newspaper motion pictures, if solely as a result of the filmmakers perceive a elementary fact: You possibly can’t get the large issues proper until you get the little issues proper, too.
R. At space theaters. Incorporates robust language and descriptions of sexual assault. 129 minutes.
