How two dogged reporters sparked the MeToo uprising
She Said (15, 129 mins)
Verdict: Too worthy by half
THE 2015 film Spotlight, chronicling the Boston Globe’s exposé of systemic child sex abuse by Catholic priests, was deservedly anointed Best Picture at the Academy Awards.
She Said attempts to do the same for the New York Times’ investigation which led to the downfall of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and ignited the MeToo movement. But it won’t be getting any Oscars.
It’s not that it’s a poor film. It is very well acted. But it is too dramatically inert, too self- consciously worthy, to count as a thriller, unlike Spotlight and that other great ‘ newspaper procedural’, All The President’s Men (1976).
Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan play the two dogged Times reporters, Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, who tracked down the actresses and other women abused by Weinstein and persuaded them to tell their stories. The film, by German director Maria Schrader with a screenplay by British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, is based on the book they wrote, also called She Said.
I can’t speak for the book, but one of the problems of the film is that in ennobling investigative journalism in general, and Twohey and Kantor in particular, its
‘ unique selling- point’ is
diluted. I was left with a sense that our modern- day Woodward and Bernstein could have been digging into corruption in baseball, or pretty much anything, because what seems to matter most to the story is their doughty perseverance, and even how they overcome
childcare issues (Kantor) and postnatal depression (Twohey) to tackle it.
It’s a shame, because it’s still a story worth telling. But it could be that MeToo fatigue is setting in, because She Said has already bombed spectacularly at the U.S. box office.