She Said

The second movie in my Saturday double feature was She Said.  I had been anticipating this for a really long time but, unfortunately, I didn't love it.  When New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) receives a tip that actress Rose McGowan was sexually assaulted by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, she begins investigating and discovers that Ashley Judd and Gwyneth Paltrow had similar encounters with him.  However, none of them want to go on the record because they are afraid that their careers will suffer.  Kantor asks Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan), a reporter who broke the story about allegations of sexual assault against Donald Trump, to help her with the investigation.  They find three former production assistants at Miramax, Rowena Chiu (Angela Yeoh), Zelda Perkins (Samantha Morton), and Laura Madden (Jennifer Ehle), who also report being sexually assaulted but fear speaking out after receiving settlements.  Even though Kantor and Twohey eventually receive corroboration from an accountant at Miramax, it is when two of the women consent to go on the record that the story is published.  For a movie that is about such an important investigation that launched a global movement and systemic change in the workforce, I found it to be strangely flat and not very compelling.  I feel like this topic could have benefited from from waiting a few years in order to get more perspective because it definitely didn't help that the details as well as the outcome of the investigation were fresh in my mind. Kazan and Mulligan do give very powerful performances but I found the scenes about their experiences as women investigating the story, such as Kantor's guilt at leaving her children, Twohey's postpartum depression, and their male editor (Andre Braugher) having to intervene on a phone call to get an answer to a question for them, to be more interesting than the investigation itself.  Morton and Ehle are also outstanding but the interviews of the victims start to become monotonous after a while, especially since they are not learning anything new just trying to get victims to go on the record.  Also, many of the interviews, including those with an unseen Weinstein, McGowan, and Paltrow, happen over the phone so they are not very interesting from a visual standpoint and they lack tension.  Finally, for a movie with a $32 million budget, the production design, while authentic, is quite dull.  I wanted to like this more than I did but I struggled with it.