‘She Said’ Review: The Harvey Weinstein Scandal Becomes a Muckraking Newspaper Drama That Puts the Spotlight on Fear

If, like me, you think about “All of the President’s Males” to be one of the vital thrilling films ever made, it’s outstanding to contemplate that it got here out in 1976, simply 4 years after the Watergate break-in. The saga of Richard Nixon’s corruption and downfall had saturated the tradition, but each second in “All of the President’s Males” tingled with discovery. That’s why it’s a movie you’ll be able to watch repeatedly. When a big-screen journalistic drama will get constructed round a information story that epic, it wants to offer you a model of that feeling. “Highlight,” the Oscar-winning 2015 drama about The Boston Globe’s unraveling of the kid intercourse abuse scandals throughout the Catholic Church, wasn’t as nice as “All of the President’s Males,” but it, too, was laced with a way of discovery. It’s there in how the movie anatomized not simply the horrific conduct of abusive monks however the omertà of the Church.

Provided that, the bar is excessive for “She Stated,” a bombshell drama about The New York Occasions’s uncovering of the Harvey Weinstein scandal in 2017. Like Watergate, the revelation of Weinstein’s crimes — not only one film mogul’s monstrousness however the entire system of secrecy and denial that dominated the world of sexual harassment and abuse in and out of doors Hollywood — was a narrative that shocked and adjusted the world. The reverberations of it are nonetheless being absorbed; Weinstein himself, now serving a 23-year jail sentence, hasn’t even completed being on trial. So chances are you’ll surprise how, precisely, “She Stated” goes to seize what that story felt like earlier than it grew to become a narrative.

The film, written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz and directed by Maria Schrader (it’s based mostly on the guide of the identical title by Occasions reporters Jodie Kantor and Megan Twohey), accomplishes this by tapping into one thing that was at all times a necessary half the Weinstein saga, however one I’ve by no means skilled as vividly as I did watching “She Stated”: the pervasive, unfathomable worry that dominated Harvey Weinstein’s victims.

The film opens in 2016, when Twohey (Carey Mulligan), a Occasions investigative reporter, is getting a number of ladies to go on the document accusing Donald Trump (then a presidential candidate) of sexual abuse. The worry is already pervasive. Trump, who telephones Twohey to disclaim the accusations, is fulminating in his rage, and after the story is revealed one of many accusers will get despatched a bag of excrement within the mail.

It’s no massive leap from Trump to Weinstein. When Kantor (Zoe Kazan) begins to get recommendations on Weinstein’s harassing conduct (and worse), she speaks on the telephone to Rose McGowan, the primary Weinstein accuser to go public, and even the livid McGowan is skittish about signing on to take part within the story. She explains that she’s been burned earlier than — by the Occasions, and by different shops who pursued a Weinstein exposé solely to drop it.

Twohey and Kantor begin working collectively, and what they uncover, talking to former staff of Miramax, is that the girl there have been systematically traumatized — first by Harvey, along with his litany of harassing rituals (the compelled massages and jacuzzi baths, the disrobing and masturbating, and, in sure instances, the act of rape), and in addition by what occurs afterwards. In the event that they communicate up, they‘ll be blackballed from the leisure trade; Harvey has the facility to do this with a telephone name. And plenty of have been pressured into signing nondisclosure agreements, which signifies that they’ll be sued in the event that they discuss. The tradition of NDAs turns into a part of the system of oppression, a method to purchase silence by demanding that these ladies signal away their voices.

Past that, the sense of entitlement that Weinstein brings to sexual abuse means that he’s a person who lives exterior the legislation, and that he’ll due to this fact cease at nothing. In “She Stated,” we by no means see Weinstein’s face, however we hear him — on the telephone, and within the chilling precise recording made by Ambra Battilana Gutierrez of her encounter with Harvey and his coercive techniques within the hallway of the Peninsula Resort. And we see him from the again, a person who carries himself like an ogre. Worry, and the struggle in opposition to it, is a key theme of “She Stated.” The movie locations that worry — of assault, of joblessness, of disgrace, of desolation, of darkish automobiles following you within the evening — on the epicenter of the tradition of abuse.

Following the template of “All of the President’s Males” and “Highlight,” “She Stated” is a tense, fraught, and absorbing film, one which sticks intriguingly near the nuts and bolts of what reporters do. When Twohey and Kantor begin displaying up, typically unannounced, on the properties of former Miramax assistants, the look of grim dread on the faces of these ladies says greater than their phrases. We see the reporters at residence, juggling work and husbands and children, and we really feel their deep solidarity with the ladies they’re making an attempt to coax into speaking. Their reporting connects former assistants, film stars (McGowan, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Ashley Judd, enjoying herself), in addition to the monetary executives who oversaw the payouts to silence Harvey’s victims. We see the journalistic juggling they must do to construct a way of collective energy in these ladies the place there’s been none. (There’s additionally the added strain after they be taught that Ronan Farrow is engaged on the identical story at The New Yorker.) Strand by strand, Twohey and Kantor weave the story of a sinister company internet with Harvey the poisonous spider at its heart.

Within the brightly lit workplaces of the Occasions, the editors add a spice of dramatic stress — Patricia Clarkson, terse and worldly as Rebecca Corbett, who won’t ever tip her hand as to only how badly she desires this story (although we learn it within the dance of Clarkson’s eyes), and Andre Braugher as Dean Baquet, a born negotiator who is aware of the right way to deal with a terrorist like Weinstein. Mulligan, now wily and now explosive, and Kazan, who beneath Kantor’s Poindexter façade creates a surprising X-ray of the journalistic thoughts whirring away, are a dynamic and, at moments, transferring staff of ace reporter operatives.

But for all the things that works about it, “She Stated,” after its excellent first hour, doesn’t constructed to an electrifying payoff in fairly the way in which you need it to. It’s not a lot that we all know what’s coming as that the story stops gathering a way of intricacy. Can Twohey and Kantor get a number of of Harvey’s abuse survivors to go on the document? With out that, they don’t have any story. But one way or the other, in the midst of ready for that breakthrough second, the movie begins to really feel extra focused, much less epic than what the Weinstein saga grew to become: a prophecy of how the world needed to change. “She Stated” stays compelling, however by the top the deliverance you’re feeling is extra redux than revelation.