“She Said” documents New York Times journalists Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey investigation of famed Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.
The film is directed by Maria Schrader, adapted from the novel by Kantor and Twohey of the same name.
The performances all around were excellent. Carey Mulligan plays Meghan and Zoe Kazan plays Jodi. They bring real emotion to their performances while also playing stern and determined journalists digging deeper into the story to find anyone who would go on record and could corroborate their facts.
Patricia Clarkson and Andre Braugher also bring solid performances as Kantor and Twohey’s superiors at the New York Times. As for real-world celebrities, Ashley Judd portrays herself in the story and Gwyneth Paltrow is also credited as voicing herself in the film. Both women were real-life accusers and victims of Weinstein.
In the beginning, the film is a little hard to follow as it jumps around a bit as it attempts to introduce the audience to the leads and their personal lives with family and another investigation that one was working on before the Weinstein investigation. After that, the story is very focused on the main plot of the Weinstein investigation at hand. I was not very familiar with the entire story, so this film did a great job of informing me about the process of putting the story together I was amazed just how deep and disturbing the story went. The film had a lot to cover in just a 129-minute runtime.
The film, while bringing attention and telling some of the women’s stories and struggles that they endured as a result of the assault, did a great job at portraying a newsroom and the work involved with being an investigative reporter and just how hard it can be to print a story, especially one of this magnitude.
The film’s score was very solid, as it greatly added suspense and tension to the scenes. Some scenes, in particular, when one of the victims was recounting their story, and there were just shots of the room with no one in, but also worked as a visual to show the audience what exactly was going on without visually repeating the assault.
“She Said” did a great job telling the women’s story. For instance, the film did not show any sexual assault in the film, but it did not shy away from the details. Also did a great job of showing just how far Jodi and Meghan and Twohey went and the struggle they faced to bring these women’s story to the light in order to expose the systemic defense of sexual assault in Hollywood.
