When the allegations of sexual harassment and assault against super-producer Harvey Weinstein were published in The New York Times and The New Yorker in October 2017, it hit Hollywood like a bomb. The stories ignited the #MeToo and Time’s Up movement, prompted an industrywide reckoning with a culture of harassment, bullying and silence, and ultimately led to Weinstein’s conviction for rape and sexual assault in New York in February 2020 and his subsequent imprisonment. Weinstein is currently on trial for rape and sexual assault in Los Angeles, where his victims have been offering gut-wrenching testimony about their experiences with him.
These events are fresh and ongoing, but at times it can feel that 2017 was eons ago. Though it’s recent history, the incredible bravery of the women who came forward and the journalists who told their story bears repeating, as in Maria Schrader’s “She Said,” the film adaptation of the book based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation by New York Times journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who broke the Weinstein story after months of investigation and decades of Weinstein successfully silencing his victims.
Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan portray Kantor and Twohey respectively in this no-nonsense journalistic drama in the vein of “All the President’s Men” or “Spotlight.” The screenplay, by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, is dense, and errs on the side of being careful, almost clinical at times, but there is a tremendous amount of pressure here, as in the investigation, to get it exactly right.
