Journalism is concerned with documents, events and facts, not psychoanalysis. There are phenomena that it describes but does not strive to explain, such as how a public body is not only able to ignore widespread violence and suffering, but also to render it banal through the language of individualised risk management, or the peculiar physics by which one man’s social comfort is prioritised over a woman’s fears for her safety and the swirling mess of self-hatred, shame, fear, and loneliness that can result. What, then, of a film that attempts to combine the two, by addressing the impossible psychic toll of sexual violence through the institutional language of documentation? Can it succeed, or does it risk losing the very force that made the #MeToo movement feel, in its early days, so exhilarating?
Many traps laid in wait for She Said. Maria Schrader’s adaptation of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey book about breaking the story of Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long abuse of women is sometimes an overly valorising paean to journalism, and – given all the glittering, eulogistic scenes of Kantor and Twohey’s colleagues busying about in its well-lit Manhattan offices – the New York Times. It also at times feels so concerned with making broader points about feminism today – can women have it all? (Kantor and Twohey at home with their husbands and children, furiously typing on their work laptops); can women be left alone? (Twohey telling a man to fuck off when he tries to interrupt the journalists at a bar) – that parts take on the tenor of a public service announcement. Schrader’s scope is broad. The film moves across continents, across generations, and across decades. The narrative unfolds via harried phone calls with actors, clandestine meetings with sources in New York coffee shops, and in the editorial rooms of the newspaper’s offices in which women stare determinedly into computer screens in the dark of the night. It almost has the structure of an epic, and you get the sense that this is the point. In the credits, the words “She Said” appear on screen translated into many different languages.
If She Said aims for a generality in resonance and message, it provides a welcome specificity in its historical setting. Set in the America of 2016, it situates the #MeToo movement within that time when public life felt like being trapped on a chaotic train clattering down an endless tunnel, the mood fragile, vulnerable, and bristling with both revolutionary and reactionary anger. Twohey is first shown speaking to sources for a story on Donald Trump’s alleged harassment of women. At home one night, she receives a call from the presidential hopeful himself. Over speakerphone, he calls her a “disgusting human being” while Twohey’s husband looks on in disbelief. On election night, the story published, Twohey receives an anonymous call threatening her rape and murder. The film picks up speed with Schrader’s fast-paced and wide-ranging depiction of the investigation into Weinstein. Kantor receives a tip about the actor Rose McGowan’s upcoming memoir, said to detail the harassment of a major industry figure, rumoured to be Harvey Weinstein. Brought together by their editors, the journalists manage to identify three former employees who worked at the Weinstein Company in the 1990s and who might talk: Rowena Chiu, Laura Madden, and Zelda Perkins.
Through flashbacks, we see them in their twenties. They are full of life, excited, and looking forward to developing long careers in film. Their experiences at the company then leave them feeling hollow and broken; a young Perkins is shown despondent at a nightclub, enviously looking onto another woman dancing, carefree. These shots can feel too brief, their purpose expository and shorthand; quick scenes of wholesale suffering shown to explanatory and dramatic effect. What is more interesting, though, is how the film uses these flashbacks to illustrate the impact of such abuse, how it can freeze and play with time in one’s mind. A final scene depicting one former employee’s catharsis is not found in the present day, but rather in an image of a past, younger self walking free. Schrader places these individual stories within a broader visual world of women. The camera lingers over women on New York streets and subways; waiting rooms at the obstetrician; crowded offices. While on a reporting trip in London, Kantor videocalls her young daughter, who asks if she’s working on a story about rape. A stunned Kantor tells her she is too young to know what the word means; her daughter tells her that a lot of kids at school say it. When the call ends, Kantor cries.
Many of these scenes are not mentioned in the book. Schrader has produced a story focused not on abuse, but rather about women’s solidarity writ large. This approach offers welcome changes: unlike many films that seek to decry violence only to then indulge it, She Said never directly shows Weinstein, and his deeds are suggested through the shots of anonymous gilded hotel rooms and corridors in which no person is present, which is something that ends up feeling far more affecting. And yet it also leaves out some of the more complicated parts of the book, such as the obstructions the journalists faced, the personalities and enablers with mixed motivations, along with how previous attempts to report on Weinstein, dating back to the 2000s, were stopped. A dramatic section on how the journalists were targeted by operatives from the private intelligence firm Black Cube (Weinstein offered a $300,000 bonus if they could block the story) is only briefly nodded to. Nor do we see much of the ambivalence on the part of their sources, usually former employees or working actors, regarding whether to speak – because their fame has made them wary of the press; because their lawyers have advised against speaking; or because they cannot be protected from legal action, nor public harassment. The murkier motivations of some of the company’s higher-ups who cooperated with the journalists – or even those who tried to block them – are not explored in the film (the book suggests that some sources saw it as a matter of saving the ailing company, rather than any moral action.) What is lost with these omissions is an opportunity to show the lengths that the powerful will go to protect themselves, and the legal, economic, and social institutions in place that upholds such silence. What is also lost is a more ambivalent yet depressing truth about how these tales – rumoured and whispered about underground for decades – are finally able to break free: not just because the world has decided to care about women, but also because it is convenient that they do so, as those in power have decided what was previously an asset has become a liability.
I can understand the reasons behind some of these omissions. Perhaps a film that constantly shows what you already know to be true – the ubiquity of gendered violence and how things are stacked against the female complainant – is boring. It can also drain you of hope. But I did wonder, as the film drew to its uplifting and tidy close, how one might tell a hopeful story that remains clear-eyed about the irrationality and brutality of power. Perhaps the greatest risk for a film like She Said is that it looks too triumphant considering how much there is still to be done, how indelible the damage can be, and how – addressed in the film – a change within one company cannot stand in for a change in public life writ large (Brad Pitt, one of the film’s producers, was recently subject to abuse allegations. Meanwhile the regression from MeToo rolls on.) As She Said walks that tightrope, at times overpromising and at other times injecting moments of solidarity, I thought about the line that Twohey and Kantor used when speaking to women wondering whether to share their stories: “I can’t change what happened to you in the past, but together we may be able to use your experience to help protect other people.” The film is most resonant when it understands its own limits, while not losing sight of its hopes. It’s entirely possible nothing will happen when the article is published, the journalists warn each other. That something did is miraculous. And yet Hollywood’s memory is short, its capacity for self-awareness lacking – and, of course, it tends towards unearned self-congratulation. Though seen as a curtain call on a tumultuous and embarrassing period of its history, She Said seems to me to mark the stirrings of a long and difficult beginning. But then, there is no real ending here.
Rebecca Liu is one of Another Gaze’s staff writers