Review: She Said offers an empowering vision of professional womanhood
A brisk, engaging drama about the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the New York Times reporters — Jodi Kantor (played by Zoe Kazan) and Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) — who broke the story, She Said is the latest in a lineage of American movies that extol the integral and democratic virtue of investigative journalism.
Other films in this mold include Steven Spielberg’s The Post (2017), which covers the publishing of the Pentagon Papers, and the Best Picture-winning Spotlight (‘15), which details the Boston Globe’s reporting on child sex abuse in the Catholic Church. But looming largest in this grand tradition is All the President’s Men, director Alan J. Pakula’s pinnacle 1976 drama-buddy film about Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein’s (Dustin Hoffman) reporting on the Watergate scandal. A quick, surface reading of President’s Men alongside this latest entry to the canon points to the former as a far more artful, formally-synthesized study of the energy that goes into investigative journalism; Pakula directs with granite leanness and, bolstered by Gordon Willis’ chiaroscuro cinematography, captures more of the claustrophobic atmosphere that one would imagine accompanies the taking-down of a formidable powerholder.
On the other hand, with She Said, Maria Schrader has directed a movie that rings with the clear, confident note of righteous determination. For one thing, Kantor and Twohey are breathtakingly accomplished people in ways that Woodward and Bernstein are not: they reside in tasteful, spacious Manhattan apartments and go to work at one of the most ostentatiously powerful newspapers in the world. They are each married to a gorgeous, even-keeled man (played by Adam Shapiro and Tom Pelphrey, respectively). Their clothes are always dry-cleaned, their hair is always coiffed. They take calls from industry insiders while pushing strollers through Central Park.
There are no under-lit meetings in parking garages or late night Chinese takeout dinners for these journalists; these are upper-middle-class, sweepingly efficient women with devoted husbands and charming little babies to come home to.
The well-integrated, adult aura of Twohey’s and Kantor’s lives is reflected in their environment: the putrid grays of the Washington Post’s drab newsroom in President’s Men gives way to the blissfully sunlit, expansive New York Times Building. Indeed, in She Said, the Times offices come across as a kind of paradise — subject to blaring TVs with the latest headlines, of course, but also swarming with intelligent, discerning writers who congregate in a dream-like cafeteria of heavenly white floors and determinedly red chairs. You find yourself asking, are we in midtown Manhattan or at a SoCal wellness center?
And this sense of feng shui doesn’t end with the Times’ furniture. Schrader and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewcz place a great deal of emphasis on what it’s like to operate in a highly demanding yet thrilling professional environment that understands the rhythms and needs of women’s lives. There are moments when Kantor and editor Rebecca Corbett (Patricia Clarkson) check in with Twohey, who is a new mother, to see how she’s doing. She describes symptoms of postpartum depression to them, and connects the research she’s doing on workplace-based sexual violence with her own body’s process of mourning.
It’s a vision of conscientious camaraderie that is reflected in the graciousness of male staffers, too — played here by Andre Braugher and Frank Wood. The Times comes across as an institution led by a racially- and gender-inclusive editorial team, a utopia where noble work is done in the name of journalistic integrity. Regardless of how true this is to real life (especially given the Times’ recent misreporting on issues pertaining to trans youth), the work that Twohey and Kantor do — and for us in the audience to consider the power, the ripple effect of good that such reporting does in the world — is moving to behold.
That being said, there are also some pretty jarring gaffs in the way of direction that soil She Said’s immaculate front. For instance, why do Kantor and Twohey feel the need to repeatedly scroll through photos of Rose McGowan or Ashley Judd moments after speaking with them on the phone? And Nicholas Britell’s score steps in way too often, accompanying scenes that’d be much stronger if they were left to play out in ambient silence. (For instance, when Kantor interacts with a Weinstein victim’s husband on the front lawn of his Silicon Valley home, the subtle desperation and regret in Kazan’s portrayal is washed out by bombastic music.)
But the worst of these blunders are a number of flashbacks to the earlier lives of various women whom Kantor and Twohey interview. Most of the flashbacks orbit around the women’s traumatic memories, offering us younger actors (Ashley Chiu and Molly Windsor) who recreate moments surrounding the abuse their older selves (Angela Yeoh and Samantha Morton) suffered at Weinstein’s hands.
Rather than provide helpful emotional context for the women’s memories, these glimpses into the past actually end up diluting their stories’ power, robbing us of a more meaningful encounter. If you simply present a closeup of an older actor, recounting their character’s memories, in the present day, that leaves more room for all that is unseen to lurk and darken in the audience’s imagination. This is why we barely see the shark in Jaws (1975), or Nixon in President’s Men.
Choices like these speak to what I’m tempted to identify as a lack of faith in audience; they are the choices of a filmmaker who doesn’t know when to step back, and allow the story to tell itself. Yet Schrader and Lenkiewicz make other choices, which do infer trust of audience, that most directors and writers do not. And this trust comes down to She Said’s emphasis on the humanity of its characters — and, by extension, its players. The film is liberally sprinkled with comfortable, lengthy scenes of conversation between two or three or four people at a time; Natasha Braier’s cinematography leans back and allows everyone to say their piece, catching all the flicks of the wrist, flinches and intakes of breath that go along with it.
One of the primary beneficiaries of this humanistic approach is Carey Mulligan — one of the greatest albeit most misused actors working in movies today. As always, she lends her character an air of quiet dignity, suggesting a rich intellectual inner life for Meghan Twohey that is evinced, obviously, in what she says and does, but also in how she holds herself. How she moves, and stares into space. The way in which exhaustion or calm assurance registers on her face. Mulligan is capable of a cerebral steadiness that is frequently at odds with the flashier demands of her most widely-recognized projects (e.g., The Great Gatsby, Promising Young Woman) — but here, it shines through.
Not all films need to be works of art; some can be content with being necessary. She Said is at its best when it envisions the working-family woman as a kind of superhero, doing dangerous work yet backed by a powerful and benevolent institution. It presents a clear new professional paradigm toward which fresh generations of workers might aspire. Imagine if all young women felt Kantor and Twohey’s confidence and comfort every time they stepped into the boss’ office.
