Hollywood ‘typage’ uses feminism as a weapon.
The actresses portraying New York Times “investigative reporters” Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor in She Said were chosen for their physical frailty, giving the film’s feminist-warrior plot a David vs. Goliath sense of underdog valor. So Cary Mulligan, playing Twohey, and Zoe Kazan, as Kantor, go up against the specter of modern-day movie mogul Harvey Weinstein (only heard or seen in shadow). Their slight figures represent courage, principle, and determination with a soupçon of girlishness, backed by the Gray Old Lady.
Mulligan and Kazan are not movie stars — they lack charisma — but each one has made a career playing misunderstood or underrated females, victims. Physically waifish, they’re always opposed by society, men, life. We’re meant to pity or cheer them on, which is the essence of She Said’s drama. Soviet cinema genius Sergei Eisenstein called this casting “typage,” using a person’s observable physical traits to typify a film character.
She Said is based on Twohey and Kantor’s 2019 book commemorating the steps by which they disgraced — presumably exposed — Weinstein, rounding up testimonies to prove allegations about his abusive sexual practices, thus helping launch the #MeToo movement. But through its lead actresses, She Said also manipulates the hoary idea of female vulnerability to justify the film’s political agenda.
What a freakishly long, humorless, and bizarre movie. One media institution absolves itself by attacking another, but we’re not asked to see both establishments as equally dangerous and corruptible. Instead, She Said follows that specious line of media self-celebration that began with All the President’s Men, the most overrated film in American movie history; it positioned journalists as social saviors, as did Spotlight, possibly the worst film to win the Best Picture Oscar.
Twohey and Kantor are presented as social saviors, like Woodward and Bernstein (“Woodstein” becoming “Twotor” — progressive-left girl power). But German director Maria Schrader and British screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz don’t understand the American professional class. In a promotional video for She Said, boasts from Twohey and Kantor reveal two hard-bitten activist-ideologues, now with celebrity status. They’re made over for the publicity tour, and this vanity unmasks the film’s depiction of each woman as martyrs — worried wives and mothers, juggling family and career obligations, dealing with the guilty stress of Fourth Wave feminism.
Seeking out women to come forth with their molestation stories, Twotor encounter over-amped suspense — everything but hound dogs snapping at their rear ends and a whistleblower hidden in a D.C. garage. These mini dramas take the Brenda Starr girl-reporters outside New York, to Hollywood and Europe, emphasizing private, previously hidden horror and anxiety. (States of fright from Jennifer Ehle and Samantha Morton steal the movie.) Scenes of teary offense and petulant crusading undercut the legitimacy of what the film sells as a “movement.”
Arrogant Mulligan and pouty Kazan, both barely suppressing anger, attempt to forge a new style of entitled snowflake heroines. But you know Schrader and Lenkiewicz’s instincts are off when they cast histrionic Patricia Clarkson and Andrew Braugher as Twohey’s and Kantor’s bosses Rebecca Corbett and Dean Bacquet, Times elites representing America’s upper-class diversity rather than coming clean as activist journalists themselves.
The real story She Said ignores is how #MeToo contributed to America’s social collapse, expedited by middle-class women like Twohey and Kantor who were positioned as transformational influencers. But going the “trust all women” route is ineffective when the film dismisses the tradition of transactional sex. Schrader, Lenkiewicz, and the readily exploitable Mulligan and Kazan perform a celebrity grudge match, pretending that bourgeois journalists and aspiring actresses and Hollywood pros don’t have the same agency, self-sufficiency, or resources of some working-class women — as if the movie industry presented the ultimate battleground of moral warfare.
She Said begins by implicitly supporting sexual allegations against Donald Trump and presenting them as equal to Weinstein’s malfeasance. It’s sheer partisanship, and it also plays the victimization game, valorizing pitiful female journalist types — an idea that Ida B. Wells, Adela Rogers St. Johns, and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday definitively rebuked.
