She Said (2022)
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She Said Movie Review
She Said is a 2022 biographical drama film directed by Maria Schrader and starring Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan. It is a very good movie that failed to reach greatness.
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“The only way these women are going to go on the record…
Is if they all jump together“
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This story about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assault allegations first broke in 2017, which is just five years from now. As a result of this recency, this movie will undoubtedly prove to be much more riveting and effective to future generations watching it a decade or more from now as most of us following Hollywood news already know this story.
Still, Maria Schrader still managed to make the movie palpably intense and actually wholly engaging throughout its entire runtime, which was mildly impressive given the limitations of the story as I’ve stated above. Her directing on this film is pretty artistic and effective, though the film never quite managed to reach truly cinematic qualities.
There is this one sequence that recreates what had been happening throughout the decades in those hotel rooms. We hear voiceover dialogue accompanied by the creepy imagery of those corridors and an ambient eerie sound, which made for such a disturbing, powerful, yet artistic scene. This is unfortunately a rare occurrence in a film that could have been so much better had it had more of that cinematic flair.
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The rest of the picture is your typical journalistic storytelling where we see these two women and their colleagues frantically searching for more information and planning their next move. While the dialogue is consistently pretty good, it is hardly amazing as the film failed to explore in more depth the power dynamics in Hollywood and it also painted the entire situation in a black-and-white, which really frustrated me.
What Harvey Weinstein did was horrendous and he should rot in jail unquestionably. The film is important for showcasing the hypocrisy of Hollywood, an industry that is supposedly a liberal haven, yet all of this harassment has happened until quite recently. But my issue is that the victims were depicted as if they could have never left their assaulter, which simply wasn’t the case. For the majority of these women, there was an option to just leave, but they chose to stay in order to advance their careers. The movie failing to bring that important point up was frustrating and it simplified the overall case to the extreme.
There is also the case of these New York Times journalists being portrayed in such a saintly manner that was borderline ridiculous. Yes, they should be applauded for their work in bringing this story to the world and starting this whole movement against sexual harassment in the workplace, but let’s just not kid ourselves that they were doing it just for the reasons of justice and activism. Watching this film, you’d think that journalists are these saints who only care about what’s right and not care about buzz at all.
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She Said is powerfully acted by its two main ladies. Zoe Kazan is terrific in a very understated, but eventually quite emotional performance. Carey Mulligan is as superb as she’s always been and the highlights were their shared moments full of support. Others also impressed in their very minor turns, but how they wrung the maximum suspense out of these journalistic endeavors was admirable. The various high-level meet-ups that the two women stage were the intense highlights of the story.
She Said is much better than it could have been owing to strong directing from Maria Schrader, and an intense tone that made the story highly engaging even for those of us who already know all about it. The performances from Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan are fantastic while the brisk pacing and its emotional investment elevated the story at hand significantly. It’s a good journalism movie that still has those pitfalls of the genre, in particular an overly simplified angle on the story and a problematic lack of cinematic qualities throughout.
My Rating – 4
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