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DVD review: She Said [1]

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Date: 2023-05-17

"Can you talk to us about what Harvey Weinstein did to you?" "Nope."

Trigger warning: the movie in this review deals with the aftermath of rape. Incidents are remembered, and in one instance there is audio of a real life assault in progress.

I take the need for a trigger warning very seriously. By contrast, I don’t take the need for a spoiler warning seriously at all. This is a movie about something that happened very recently, and if you keep up with current events, such as by reading Daily Kos, this movie has already been “spoiled” for you. I wished I could amend the movie’s epilogue, but then I realized that even more amendments will be needed later.

Rapists like Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein intimidate their victims into silence. Everyone else in their circle is also silent due to either complacency or willful complicity. Anyone who dares speak out against the monster finds herself in a situation not that different than a victim’s.

Technically, Donald Trump is still an alleged rapist. It’s an odd courtesy to extend to someone who is so obviously guilty. People have been convicted of murder with far less evidence.

And yet it still seems impossible to convict Donald Trump of rape. Even so, the verdict in the E. Jean Carroll case last week was amazing. It wasn’t as good as we would have liked but it was much better than we expected.

Ireland, 1992. (top) By the shore, cast and crew for a historical movie. (bottom) In the middle of a city street.

It wouldn’t have been possible without the efforts of New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey to bring now convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein to accountability. That’s the same New York Times that manufactured scandals about the Clinton Foundation, but you have to give credit where credit’s due.

Last week’s verdict was unthinkable in 2016, even though it was no secret back then that Donald Trump is a creepy and perverted pile of garbage. Instead of finding evidence to exonerate Trump, his supporters intimidated the women who dared speak out against the monster with the dumb comb-over.

That’s where the movie She Said begins, after a prologue in Ireland in 1992. One of Donald Trump’s many rape victims, and one of the few who dared speak to New York Times reporter Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan), now blames the reporter for the dangerous and disgusting packages being mailed to her home. Twohey herself also gets rape and death threats, which of course doesn’t help Twohey think about Trump’s presumed innocence.

At about the same time, Twohey’s colleague Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) starts investigating Rose McGowan’s allegations against Harvey Weinstein. Kantor finds McGowan credible, but also rather prickly.

The other victims of course don’t want to speak out on the record. A lot of the first act of this movie consists of reporters on the phone getting hung up on. Nevertheless, the reporters persist.

Getting one of Weinstein’s lawyers to make excuses for his client — such as the pervert’s fluid “understanding of consent” — is actually more of a break than the reporters at first realize.

Kantor talks to accountant Irwin Reiter (Zach Grenier), a real person and not a composite character. “Why are you asking about the nineties when Harvey Weinstein has committed so many more recent offenses?” Reiter asks Kantor.

Irwin Reiter realizes it’s even worse than he thought.

Reiter was more than just an accountant. But despite being an executive vice president at Weinstein’s company, he still felt trepidation at speaking out. This is expressed quite concisely and powerfully in this movie.

Reiter had been trying in vain to get Weinstein to rein in his behavior. But talking to Kantor, he realizes that what he’s done so far is way too little. Weinstein is too brazen and too entitled to listen to reason. Reiter realizes that he needs to cross a line he has never dared to cross before.

I checked this movie out from the library, found it due to a filing error. I was looking in the TV series section for a season of Star Trek: Discovery or Star Trek: Picard that I haven’t seen yet. And then I saw Sherlock Season 4, and couldn’t remember if I had seen it already.

And there was She Said, which surprised me, because I thought it was a movie and not a TV series. Maybe it was a spiritual ancestor to Alaska Daily, a TV series in which two women reporters investigate the unreported crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women in Alaska. She Said is a movie, only one DVD in the case, just the movie and a 7-minute featurette.

She Said is an unexpectedly engrossing thriller about an investigation that involved many obstacles and dead ends. We feel the reporters’ frustration that they’re not making any headway in the investigation, but we also feel that maybe they might crack the case if they just keep at it.

The DVD includes a short documentary in which the real Jodi Kantor mentions that the idea for making this investigation into a movie came from Harvey Weinstein himself.

Rated R by the MPAA for language and descriptions of sexual assault. Featurette is not rated.

★★★★☆ Not the full five stars, only because the DVD’s light on bonus features. The 7-minute documentary could easily have been a half hour or an hour. I would’ve watched it, there’s plenty of interesting details about the real story and how it was compressed for the movie. Or maybe that’s on the BluRay. The movie per se is of the right duration.

P. S. I also checked out The Assistant, hailed by critics but panned by audiences (see Rotten Tomatoes). I have to agree with the audiences on this one. It’s like they were trying to imitate Robert Bresson or Yang Zhimou but instead just wound up making a very boring movie, not worth writing more than a paragraph or two about it. I give The Assistant ★☆☆☆☆. I guess I’m giving it the star I withheld from She Said. If you only watch one Me Too movie, choose She Said.

2nd P.S. I need to revise my book Movies by the Book: The Hound of the Baskervilles, but I don’t know when I’ll get around to it. If you want, you can get it now for 80% off with coupon code RC63C, and when I publish the update you can get that for free. But note the coupon code is only good on Smashwords, and not any of the other places where this book has been sold.

I thought about writing a book about movies based on current events, but with so many other writing projects on my plate, I make no promises.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/17/2168388/-DVD-review-She-Said

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