If you, like me, consider “All the President’s Men” to be one of the most exciting films ever made, it is remarkable that it appeared in 1976, just four years after the storming of Watergate. The saga of Richard Nixon’s corruption and fall has saturated the culture, but every moment in All the President’s Men has been filled with discovery. This is why it is a movie that you can watch over and over again. When a big screen journalistic drama is built around a news story who – which Epic, should give you a version of that feeling. “Spotlight,” the 2015 Academy Award-winning drama about the Boston Globe’s exposing the child sexual abuse scandals within the Catholic Church, wasn’t on the same level as “All the President’s Men,” but it was also filled with a sense of discovery. It’s there in how the film dissects not only the horrific behavior of abusive priests but also Omerta the church.
Given that, so high is the ceiling for “She Said,” a startling drama about the New York Times’ revealing of the Harvey Weinstein scandal in 2017. Like Watergate, the revelations about Weinstein’s crimes – not just one movie mogul’s brutality but an entire system of secrecy And the denial that has pervaded the arena of sexual harassment and assault inside and outside Hollywood – a story that shocked the world and changed the world. Its echoes are still being absorbed; Weinstein himself, who is now serving a 23-year prison sentence, has not even finished trial. So you might be wondering how “She’s Happy” will capture exactly what that story was like before it became a story.
The film, written by Rebecca Linkewicz and directed by Maria Schrader (based on the book of the same title by Times reporters Judy Kantor and Megan Twohy), accomplishes this by making use of something that has always been an essential part of Weinstein’s saga, but one I’ve never experienced with the vibrancy that I’ve seen. Said: The pervasive, unfathomable fear that ruled the victims of Harvey Weinstein.
The film opened in 2016, when Toohy (Carrie Mulligan), an investigative reporter for The Times, made several women record accusations of sexual assault by Donald Trump (then-presidential candidate). Fear is already spreading. Trump, who contacts Twohey to deny the accusations, explodes in anger, and after the story is published a stool bag of one of the accused is mailed.
It’s not a big leap from Trump to Weinstein. When Kantor (Zoe Kazan) started getting advice about Weinstein’s harassing behavior (and worse), she spoke on the phone to Rose McGowan, Weinstein’s first accuser to be made public, and even an angry McGowan fumbles about logging in to share a story. She explains that she’s been burned before – by the Times, and by other media outlets who have followed the Weinstein exhibition only to be abandoned.
Twohey and Kantor begin working together, and what they discover, speaking to former Miramax employees, is that the woman there has been systematically traumatized – first by Harvey, with his harassing rituals (forced massage and whirlpool baths, disrobing and masturbation, and in some cases , the act of rape), as well as what happens next. If they spoke, they would be excluded from the entertainment industry; Harvey has the ability to do this with a phone call. And many were pressured to sign nondisclosure agreements, meaning they would be sued if they spoke out. NDA culture became part of the system of oppression, and a way to buy silence by asking these women to give up their votes.
Moreover, the sense of entitlement that Weinstein brings to the sexual assault suggests that he is a man who lives outside the law, and thus will stop at nothing. In “She’s Happy,” we never see Weinstein’s face, but we hear him—on the phone, and in the frightening actual recording made by Ambra Batilana Gutierrez of her confrontation with Harvey and his coercive tactics in the lobby of the Peninsula Hotel. And we see him from behind, a man carrying himself like an ogre. Fear, and fighting it, is a major theme in “she said.” The film places this fear—of unemployment, shame, physical and spiritual ruin, and darkened cars that follow you at night—at the center of a culture of abuse.
Following the model of “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlights,” “She’s Happy” is a tense, charged and absorbent film, one that sticks intriguingly close to the nuts and bolts of what journalists do. When Twohey and Kantor begin to appear, often unspoken, in the homes of former Miramax lieutenants, the look of bleak dread on these women’s faces says more than their words. We see reporters at home, juggling with work, husbands, and children, and feel their deep solidarity with the women trying to get them to talk. Their reports link former assistants and movie stars (McGowan, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ashley Judd, who plays her), as well as financial executives who oversaw payments to silence Harvey’s victims. We see the journalistic maneuvers they have to do to build a sense of collective strength in these women where there was none. (There’s also added stress when they learn that Ronan Farrow is working on the same story in The New Yorker.) Strand Toothy and Kantor weave the story of a sinister corporate web with Harvey the venomous spider at its center.
In the brightly lit Times offices, editors add a flavor of dramatic tension — Patricia Clarkson, succinct and mundane as Rebecca Corbett, who would never tip her hand about how much she wanted this story (although we read it in Clarkson’s Eyes Dance), and Andre Prager as Dean Paquet, a born negotiator who knows how to deal with a terrorist like Weinstein. Mulligan, now cunning and now explosive, and Kazan, who beneath Kantor’s Poindexter facade create stunning x-rays of a journalist’s mind scurrying away, are a dynamic, and in moments, animated team of elite reporter clients.
However, for all that works out, “She Said”, after its brilliant first hour, isn’t built to make impressive gains quite the way it would like it to. We don’t know what will happen so much as the story ceases to accumulate a sense of complexity. Can Twohey and Kantor get one or more Harvey abuse survivors to sign up? Without it, they have no story. Yet somehow, in the course of waiting for that breakthrough moment, the film begins to feel more targeted, and less epic than the Weinstein saga has become: a prediction of how the world must change. “She is Happy” remains compelling, but in the end she feels that the salvation she feels is more than a revelation.
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