‘She Said’: Film fails to hold Weinstein and Hollywood accountable

Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan in She Said, a biopic about the journalists that uncovered Harvey Weinstein.

It’s usually frowned upon when critics give away a film’s ending. But She Said, the new drama about the New York Times’s investigation into Harvey Weinstein, is surely an exception: we all know exactly where that particular chain of events wound up. In 2017, the newspaper’s exposé went out and the predatory producer subsequently went down for 23 years, after being convicted of rape and sexual assault.

The story was so seismic that commentators coined the phrase “the Weinstein effect” to describe the wave of allegations against powerful men in film and television that followed in its wake. The dramatisation of the writing of said story, however, has been rather less world-shaking in impact. On its release last weekend in the United States and Canada, She Said took just $2.2 million (NZ$3.5 million): not just well below industry expectations, but a sum the Hollywood Reporter described as one of the worst results in years for a studio film opening on more than 2,000 screens.

I wasn’t personally taken with the film at all – with the exception of the scorching supporting performances from Samantha Morton and Jennifer Ehle as two crucial sources, I found it dramatically inert and often maddeningly smug. But among critics, at least, I’m in a clear minority, as its 87 per cent score on Rotten Tomatoes attests.

So why are cinemagoers so much less enthused? A producer friend has a compelling theory: everyone who could possibly want to see a film about Weinstein’s fall would already know the plot inside out, since every last detail was combed through in the media for years. In purely dramatic terms, its narrative is missing the naturally thrillerish twists and turns of the film on which it’s clearly been modelled, the 1977 Best Picture nominee All the President’s Men (which was also adapted from a book by the two journalists at its centre).

It also lacks the relative unfamiliarity of the 2016 Best Picture winner Spotlight, which revisited a 12-year-old scandal with which many viewers were only glancingly aware, particularly outside of the United States. Weinstein was very recent global news – still is, in fact, with a second trial ongoing in Los Angeles – so it’s perhaps unsurprising that few of us are in the mood for a recap.

A scene from the movie, Spotlight.

But perhaps there’s another factor at play here, rooted in the mere fact of She Said’s existence – or rather, its existence as an Oscar-chasing, studio-backed picture, overtly made in the style of the acclaimed newsroom dramas above. Essentially, there’s some moral sleight of hand going on: by manoeuvring itself onto the opposite side of the story, Hollywood is quietly letting itself off the hook.

At the film’s Los Angeles premiere earlier this month, the closing on-screen captions detailing Weinstein’s convictions were met with whoops and cheers. But Los Angeles was the town that sustained Weinstein’s career for four decades, and where his behaviour (as the New York Times itself reported) was relatively common knowledge.

In fact, Hollywood itself doesn’t even appear in She Said as a location, let alone a visible entity of which Weinstein is a part. There are two or three glimpses of the Los Angeles skyline, usually at the start of scenes involving Ashley Judd, the first actress to go on the record about Weinstein, and who plays herself here. But, otherwise, the action is mostly confined to a strikingly unglittering New York, with Carey Mulligan’s Megan Twohey and Zoe Kazan’s Jodi Kantor making phone calls, having very measured conversations with their editor (Patricia Clarkson) and visiting former Weinstein employees at their homes around the state. The fact he makes films is almost by-the-by: this could be a probe into sexual harassment in any workplace in the world. And while the film’s makers would surely argue that’s partly the point, it also feels like a convenient dodge.

“I’m investigating systemic sexism in Hollywood,” Kazan tells Mulligan early in the film, while Morton’s character ends her testimony with: “This is bigger than Weinstein. This is about the system protecting abusers.” But intentionally or otherwise, the film paints Weinstein as a rogue, lone-wolf figure – and that broader culture of turning a blind eye, referred to by both Kazan and Morton, is ultimately ignored. The closest thing to an accomplice the film comes up with is a former accountant responsible for arranging the payoffs to Weinstein’s victims, which always came with menacing nondisclosure agreements attached.

Harvey Weinstein was convicted of rape and criminal sexual assault in New York in 2020. Photo / AP

As for Weinstein himself, he appears in just one sequence – a fraught visit to the New York Times office, in which he attempts to browbeat them out of running the story – and even then is seen only from behind. That decision feels revealing of the industry’s ongoing reluctance to reckon with Weinstein head on: here he’s still the hidden bogeyman, rather than the monster operating in plain sight. Compare that curious fudge to the brilliantly chilling decision in Kitty Green’s The Assistant – the 2019 film often described as the first #MeToo movie – to leave its abusive producer figure unnamed as well as unseen, even though he’s obviously Weinstein-inspired. That unsettling move created a bloodcurdling sense of complicity: that even the audience is in on a huge, dreadful secret that’s going unsaid.

“If you want a happy ending,” Orson Welles once declared, “that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” She Said concludes with a mouse pointer clicking on a button marked “publish”: the investigation runs and the dragon is slain. It’s a very convenient point for the business to declare the matter closed.