Movie Review: She Said

by | Nov 30, 2022 | What I'm Seeing and Hearing | 4 comments

If you haven’t seen this movie yet, you should. It is still playing locally (in greater Boston), but I’ve read that it’s not making a lot of money at the box office.

It is a film that deserves to be seen. Think “All the President’s Men” (Woodward and Bernstein crack the Watergate scandal), but the journalists are women who, unlike Woodward and Bernstein, actually have private lives with spouses and kids. And the investigation consists not so much of following the money or tracking down who was where on the night in question, or what the president knew and when he knew it, but of finding women who were willing to talk about the ways a famous sexual predator had ruined their careers and in some cases, their lives.

Jodi Kantor (Zoey Kazan) and Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) are terrific in this film directed (Maria Schrader) and written (Rebecca Lenkiewicz) by women. The subject matter—the investigative reporting that went into uncovering the story of film producer Harvey Weinstein’s serial sexual rapes and assaults—may be triggering for many, yet the sense of triumph that results from the courage of both journalists and the women who came forward to the degree that they were able (some were never able or willing to go on the record; others did so after agonizing struggle, fully aware of the potential costs to not only their careers, but to their emotional and psychological well-being). Some women maintained silence for years; others talked about what had happened but found themselves ignored.

The film has gotten some good reviews but it has also gotten a number of lukewarm notices. What I find remarkable about this is that so many of those lukewarm reviews were written by men. Both the Boston Globe and the Washington Post ran extremely positive reviews, and both were written by women.