Writer: Rebecca Lenkiewicz
Director: Maria Schrader
He created the silence, one of the women in Rebecca Lenkiewicz and Maria Schrader’s new film She Said, explained and it involved a grand scale system of abuse within his company by people who knowingly and unknowingly paid women not to talk. Otherwise, women were pulled aside and advised to sit in armchairs or wear a puffer jacket to deter him, left to support each other through their encounters with Harvey Weinstein. And that silence was strong enough to last for decades, until two New York Times reporters, their team and a handful of survivors willing to go on the record brought it all out into the open. And the world changed a little a bit.
Based on journalist Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor’s book of the same name, She Said screening in the BFI London Film Festival 2022 rounds off an event that has carefully championed stories about violence and abuse against women in all its forms. From Palm Trees and Power Lines to Jeong-sun, Declaration and Women Talking, it feels appropriate to enter the Festival’s final weekend with a story of what can happen when women are believed and come together to effect important change.
Like all investigative reporting movies, there is a formula employed by writer Lenkiewicz that begins before Megan and Jodi are even working together, framing their involvement in the type of journalism they write as well as their personal circumstances at the time that their piece was being compiled. There are dramatic peaks along the way – will a source go on the record, will Weinstein’s team shut down the story and can they get an inside man to corroborate any of the claims made with other kinds of evidence such as financial records, memos and NDA letters. She Said is formulaic in the sense that like Spotlight and All the President’s Men, the journalistic process as much as the story being investigated has to generate its own drama.
The film’s weakest spot is needing to show so much of the homelives of the journalists, juggling babies, husbands and other demands while fielding calls at all hours from celebrities, sources and each other to get the job done. There to increase audience understanding of their sacrifices to get Weinstein’s crimes into the public consciousness, the sheer number of them takes up space in a 2 hour and 10-minute drama that could have been given to the voices of more women he affected and in understanding why men working for Miramax agreed to help Megan and Jodi, pointing them to more recent crimes, when so many journalists before them had been denied the evidence they needed.
But there’s no denying the cumulative power of She Said and as the film unfolds, the number and similarity of the survivors’ experiences are each given a moment. And there are some extraordinary performances here; from Jennifer Ehle as Laura Madden, facing breast cancer but quite movingly recounting her experience on a beach in Cornwall; from Samantha Morton as Zelda Perkins whose compression of rage and hurt is magnificent as she talks to Jodi in a London café; from Angela Yeoh playing Zelda’s friend who was raped by Weinstein and talks about the cultural expectations to keep quiet and from Ashley Judd who plays herself, recounting her own attempts to break the silence.
Carey Mulligan as Meghan and Zoe Kazan as Jodi are persistent and determined but never pushy or concerned for the exposure the story will bring them. There’s a great scene early on as Meghan faces down Donald Trump over the phone and Mulligan brings that same gutsy determination to an eventually confrontation with Weinstein whose face is never shown. Schrader’s direction is pacey and while She Said is certainly and purposefully emotive, it is as rigorous in presenting the gathering of evidence as the two journalists who finally ended the silence. Women spoke and finally everyone listened.
She Said is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2022.