Around the time that Tom McCarthy’s 2015 newsroom drama Spotlight started piling up critics’ awards en route to the best picture Oscar, more than a few wags commented that film critics are not to be trusted on films that make the journalism industry look good: it’s the hand that feeds us, after all. Still, Hollywood tends to oscillate between two extremes on journalists: they’re either virtuous crusaders for truth and justice or leeching, corrupt sleazebags.
Maria Schrader’s solidly absorbing She Said (2022) takes the former stance. Its story of how New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey (studiously played by Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan) exposed Harvey Weinstein’s serial sexual abuse and triggered the #MeToo movement is fresh in everyone’s minds. Too fresh, perhaps, which may be why the film made few waves at the box office or with awards voters. Its pleasures lie instead in the granular, procedural depiction of how such a vast story comes together. As its heroines go knocking on doors and crossing continents in pursuit of sources – one of them played in a blistering one-scene performance by Samantha Morton – She Said becomes an ode to the enduring importance of shoe-leather reporting in an increasingly online realm.
