The title takes the second half of the famous phrase habitually used to dismiss rape allegations as hearsay – “he said, she said” – and in doing so restores the importance of women’s testimony. This is the story of the two New York Times reporters, Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, and their battle to write the story about the now disgraced and imprisoned movie producer Harvey Weinstein and his decades-long practice of intimidation, harassment and rape of young female actors and junior staff, hushing them up with threats and NDA payoffs, enabled by a vast male superstructure of silence. It is adapted by Rebecca Lenkiewicz from the journalists’ book of the same title and directed by Maria Schrader.
The journalists’ plan was to try for a number of accusers going public at once – or failing that, to get one prominent survivor on the record and count on others coming forward; this was the foundation of the #MeToo strategy. Carey Mulligan plays Twohey and Zoe Kazan plays Kantor, and theirs is a very 21st-century workplace: as well as their stressful work, Twohey and Kantor have to deal with motherhood, babies and exhaustion, which never worried Woodward and Bernstein. But as life is messy and complicated, someone else is working on the same story: Ronan Farrow for the New Yorker, whose work is mentioned rather cursorily in this movie. Perhaps his good-faith contribution could have been acknowledged with a bit more generosity?
