{"id":96525,"date":"2022-10-14T03:43:17","date_gmt":"2022-10-14T03:43:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/she-said-review-a-stirring-drama-about-the-fall-of-harvey-weinstein-movies\/"},"modified":"2022-10-14T03:43:17","modified_gmt":"2022-10-14T03:43:17","slug":"she-said-review-a-stirring-drama-about-the-fall-of-harvey-weinstein-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/she-said-review-a-stirring-drama-about-the-fall-of-harvey-weinstein-movies\/","title":{"rendered":"She Said review \u2013 a stirring drama about the fall of Harvey Weinstein | movies"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It’s tempting to eye-roll She Said, the film adaptation of New York Times journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s 2019 book of the same name on their investigation into Harvey Weinstein.<\/p>\n

I entered the film, from Unorthodox director Maria Schrader and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz, concerned it would feel too self-congratulatory for the diffuse, difficult, ongoing #MeToo movement, wary of another peg in the inevitable viral content-to-screen pipeline. There was high potential that it would be, like Hollywood’s beleagured #MeToo organization Time’s Up, burdened by the albatross of celebrity \u2013 too focused on Weinstein as a singularly villainous figure, or sunk by distracting impersonations of famous people. Who wants to see an actor transform into Harvey Weinstein, even for the undoubtedly tense and cinematic moment when the producer showed up unannounced to the Times’s office days before publishing as a last-ditch intimidation tactic?<\/p>\n

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Weaker movies would go all-in for such drama, but Schrader and Lenkiewicz have crafted a sensitive, emotionally astute movie that avoids such pitfalls. It’s solid recent history faithful to its source material \u2013 reverent even, as underlined by Nicholas Brittell’s full-bodied, foreboding score.<\/p>\n

Schrader and cinematographer Natasha Braier effectively blend nutritive literal realism (Kantor googling photos of famous actors, a browser with 30+ open tabs, the New York Times’s content management system, the Times’s cafeteria) with emotional realism, trained on the collective \u201cshe\u201d of the title. To wit: the film opens not in 2016 New York but Ireland, 1992, where a young Laura Madden stumbles onto a film set and into an entry-level job, amenable and eager. Cut to a shot of her sprinting down the street in tears, face stricken with horror.<\/p>\n

Flashbacks to multiple women’s younger selves weave throughout the film in brief, potent snippets, effectively grounding the requisite competency porn of a newsroom drama with the numerous emotional rivers coursing beneath it.<\/p>\n

The work sequences, in which Kantor (Zoe Kazan) and Twohey (Carey Mulligan) call and call again and show up unannounced, are indeed satisfying to watch. As in Spotlight, Tom McCarthy’s 2015 film on The Boston Globe’s investigation into systemic sexual abuse by the Catholic church, She Said delivers on the dopamine hits of a journalism movie: proficient pace (the movie runs just over two hours but feels shorter), tactile work, the thrill of pavement pounded into revelation.<\/p>\n

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