“She Said” is a thoughtful, moving account of women speaking
In 2020, German actress Maria Schrader made her directorial debut with the Netflix miniseries “Unorthodox”, the first Netflix series to be primarily in Yiddish. It was a tale of a woman unmaking and then remaking herself. In 2021, she made her feature film debut with the cleverly acerbic sci-fi German film “I’m Your Man” – a love-story between an anthropologist and a robot. This year, Schrader makes her English feature film debut with “She Said”, a journalistic biographical film about Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s investigation and subsequent writing leading up to their initial New York Times report on Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual abuse and misconduct.
I admit, I was hesitant about what Schrader would do with this story. Hollywood’s reckoning with Harvey Weinstein, a giant and monster of the film industry over the last three decades, still feels diffuse. Even as Weinstein sits in prison, the systems that enabled him are still alive. And so, a Hollywood film about a Hollywood injustice only a handful of years removed from the event (the story was published in 2017 and Weinstein was jailed a few years later) felt like a red flag. How much would the film be able to examine something so close itself. And yet, I realise my fears were unfounded. With only “Unorthodox” and “I’m Your Man” under her wing, Schrader’s work as a director has already shown a sharp ability to engage with familiar themes with subversive imagination and in “She Said”, that thoughtfulness becomes the lynchpin of gentle but radical piece of resistance filmmaking.
“She Said” opens with a double prologue. This double prologue is, perhaps, the only moment of the film that feels too unsubtle. The first prologue, set in the early nineties, gives us little information. A young girl in Ireland walks through a film set, we cut suddenly to her running through the streets in disarray. The second prologue is in 2016. NYT journalist Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) is investigating a story on accusations of sexual harassment from presidential candidate Donald Trump. Twohey’s story is published, it sets off a string of conversations, but Trump wins the election and Megan faces the heat of angry phone-calls. The prologue is a bit too dependent on dramatic irony. We know this is a story about Weinstein so we can imagine what the girl in Ireland is running from. Similarly, we know that Trump remains free of any criminal charges although the line between male bullies like Weinstein and Trump is a straight. The point of the double prologue is clear, the screenplay wants to set up the macro stakes before we zero in. When the proper story begins a few months into Trump’s tenure in 2017, everything falls into place.
Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) is the first journalist on the story. Soon, Twohey is assigned and the two begin to meet with a string of women and “She Said” immediately settles into a cadence of exploratory investigation. The rhythm of the film is excellent in these sequences. This is a story of abuse, but it is also a story of investigation. The title speaks to the women who dared to put their name on their records, but the title also feels tied to the work of Twohey and Kantor who also speak, to each other, to the women and to the men who are complicit. They are mothers themselves, and aware of how important that speaking is. And it is in the moments of them speaking that “She Said” turns the familiar into the incisive.
How does a screenplay structure a story so that those who know of the issues are not bored, but also so that those without the context of Weinstein and Miramax are able to follow? Screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz (whose excellent credits include Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” anthology series, and Sebastian Lelio’s lesbian-drama “Disobedience”) has an impossible task. She creates “She Said” as an act of repeated persistence. Women briefly
pop into the story, and then pop out, but each entry (and re-entry) is treated like a window into a different world. For a story so ostensibly prosaic, Lenkiewicz writes some ambitious experiments with timelines and flashbacks into her work that are buoyed by Schrader’s direction. Under Schrader, Natasha Braier’s camera is constantly seeking. Monologues of confession find the camera trailing off elsewhere. In an early scene, an audio recording of harassment is complemented by the camera eerily moving through an empty hotel room. It is in the delicate lensing of empty spaces that “She Said” stirs our imagination in damning ways, even as the film avoids any sexually traumatic images on screen.
I feel genuinely moved by how thoughtful Maria Schrader, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Carey Mulligan, Nicholas Britell and every other actor and craftsman in this has chosen to rise to the task of this story. So much in the publicity for this, and the framing seemed to be trapped between two equally unpleasant polarities: i) a cinematic version of eating your vegetables, respectful and staid, or ii) a lurid foray into a story so recent that it would burst at its seams. But, “She Said” feels so ambitious in its approach to lensing, music, performance, and structure while still being so modest and unflashy in its countenance. Dread and tension overwhelm it, so much that this investigation feels dangerous even with no overt (or covert) threats of death. It’s in the silence and absences that so much of its imagination feels so profound. Britell’s music is critical to the cultivation of this mood. But the entire film seems to spring forth from its quiet confidence.
This is not just a thematically strong work, but one that feels technically and structurally ambitious. There is the way that voices and monologues become disembodied as a matter of praxis and the time-jumps are simultaneously jarring and natural so that you’re not quite sure where the
time went. There is also the way that in performance Carey Mulligan’s Megan is genuinely working the people she interviews – she’s doing one thing with her voice, another thing with her eyes and a third thing with her body. Whenever a new woman appears, Schrader seems immediately engaged with them. So, Samantha Morton in a single scene feels like something masterful. Or Jennifer Ehle, who we meet throughout the film, is offered a moving final scene that sees her as more than another note in the long line of Weinstein horrors. The grace of “She Said” is in the spatial acuity of rooms the characters walk through. Or in the quiet knowing glances that Patricia Clarkson and Andre Braugher (who play two senior editors assisting Twohey and Kantor) evoke. Or, in the way it sets up two excellent moments anticipating a “who will play this person” sequence only to subvert both moments, in different ways. Or in an early moment that made me sure this film had more on its mind than the norm when a tearful Megan during postpartum distress is asked to join the story. She’s asked if working might help her. And there’s the slightest pause before Mulligan responds. In that moment it’s clear that “She Said” sees all the women in its frames as women juggling multiple versions of themselves.
“She Said” feels so nimble in craft, but so thoughtful despite (or because of) the way it chooses to initially misdirect us. Why that opening? What that subsequent prologue? Why the gaps in the middle where we lose Megan for so long? And yet, it all feels so generous and decisive as it goes on. Beyond the subject matter, the genuine awareness of the work of journalism feels so sharp without being officious. This is no staid but proper biopic but a thoughtful engagement with what it means for women to speak truth to power.