She Said

by Julian Spivey

Photo: Universal Pictures

Director: Maria Schrader 
Starring: Carey Mulligan, Zoe Kazan & Patricia Clarkson
Rated: R
Runtime: 2 hours & 15 minutes 

​Director Maria Schrader’s “She Said,” about New York Times reporters and their sources who helped take down behemoth movie producer Harvey Weinstein circa 2017, is one of 2022’s best films thus far and one of the better journalism films you’re going to see.

I’m a fanboy of journalism movies for sure. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen one that I didn’t at least somewhat like. I was a print journalism minor in college, and I’m married to a journalist. It’s a subject I admire. “She Said” is one of the best journalism movies I’ve seen because it mostly gets its subject right. It makes journalism look as hard as it truly is to run down all of these sources, fact-check and piece together a story that is on one hand extremely important, but also one that might make enemies and lead to lawsuits.

“She Said” sees NYT reporters Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) and Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) follow a tip that actress Rose McGowan was sexually assaulted by Weinstein and the dominoes begin to follow from there with the journos realizing there’s a long line of women Weinstein sexually assaulted, included actresses Gwyneth Paltrow and Ashley Judd (who plays herself in the film).

Much of “She Said” is these actors running down leads and sources and interviewing them and it was all completely riveting to me – though I feel like some not as interested in the profession or the particular story might find it a bit boring.

Mulligan is billed first in “She Said,” but it felt to me like Kazan did a bit of the heavy lifting, probably because her character of Kantor was the one of the two reporters able to fly across the world to interview subjects in the United Kingdom because Mulligan’s Twohey was a new parent needing to be with her child.

The film does a good job showing these two reporters balancing their work life with their home lives, both are parents of young children, and you can tell the toll their busy, but important work has on their lives.

It’s a couple of scenes during Kantor’s trip overseas that truly are among the finest in the film with her meeting with former Miramax employees Zelda Perkins (Samantha Morton) and employee Laura Madden (Jennifer Ehle) in separate meetings. Back in New York she also has a meeting with Irwin Reiter (Zach Grenier), one of Weinstein’s former accountants who wants to do good but believes his life to be in danger for helping. These meetings all go a long way to helping Kantor and Twohey complete the story.

The performances from Mulligan and Kazan are terrific and it would be nice to see them receive some award recognition, though it might be an easier route for Mulligan who will reportedly be put up as a supporting actress candidate in what amounts to a bit of category fraud.

The direction by Schrader, likely previously most known for directing the 2020 Netflix limited series “Unorthodox” for which she won an Emmy, is fairly incredible here, especially in that it’s able to make one-on-one scenes between actors so riveting when they could easily be boring. She also makes some good decisions in not trying to recreate horrible moments between Weinstein and his victims but instead doing it through monologues and at one point even a recorded tape between Weinstein and a victim.

The film is based on the book She Said, which Kantor and Twohey collaborated on and released in 2019 after they had completed work on their investigation and reporting about how they did the job they did, and Rebecca Lenkiewicz did a fantastic job with the screenplay based on their book. If “She Said” is most likely to garner an Oscar nomination it’s probably for Adapted Screenplay.