Film: She Said Harry Mount

Arts

FILM HARRY MOUNT SHE SAID (15)

This admirable film about Harvey Weinstein is Hamlet without the prince – or without the serial sexual predator, to be precise.

Every detail of Weinstein’s rapes and sexual assaults is carefully and correctly recounted. But Weinstein (played by Mike Houston) appears only briefly and then only from the back and never says anything to the camera – though you do hear his chilling, deadpan voice in recordings of his threats to his victims and New York Times editors for exposing him.

It was two New York Times reporters, Megan Twohey (a masterful performance by Carey Mulligan, with a pitch-perfect American accent) and Jodi Kantor (a convincing, understated Zoe Kazan), who helped bring Weinstein down. Ronan Farrow, son of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, was carrying out a parallel but separate exposé for the New Yorker.

Both scoops were triumphs of journalism. Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s screenplay and Maria Schrader’s direction accurately and admirably retell the story, taken from the news reports and book by Kantor and Twohey.

There’s none of the playing-around with facts that ruins so many Hollywood non-fiction films.

It helps that Brad Pitt is one of the producers. Pitt knows the subject deeply – he went out with Gwyneth Paltrow, one of Weinstein’s victims, and so was aware of his crimes for years before the predator was convicted.

The film sets are perfect, too, not least because the actual New York Times building (pictured) in Manhattan was used for filming. And the disembodied voice of Donald Trump, which crops up on a phone call to the journalists, is spot-on, provided by James Austin Johnson, who played Donald Trump so funnily in Saturday Night Live.

The battle by Twohey and Kantor to get Weinstein’s victims to talk is engaging. The quest is neatly summed up in this bit of snappy dialogue:

Twohey: The only way these women are going to go on the record…

Kantor: …is if they all jump together.

The poor victims, having been through hell with Weinstein once, have to face it a second time as his legal and media machine tries to shut them and the New York Times down.

As a clever line in the film puts it, ‘Harvey built the silence.’ One of the many horrors of his behaviour is how victims learnt to put up with his attacks because they knew they didn’t have a chance of exposing him, to begin with.

So they wore thick puffer jackets in meetings to fend off his groping paws, and never sat next to him on the sofa.

How brave it was when the victims broke cover for the New York Times – among them Rose McGowan and the actress Ashley Judd, who movingly plays herself in the film.

The fact that we know Weinstein is ultimately found out doesn’t take away from the interest in the intricacies of the stories that finished him off. And yet there’s something lacking.

Because Weinstein barely appears, you miss out on the big baddie of the operation. Perhaps the filmmakers didn’t want to draw attention to him. Perhaps they’re wary of the fact that Weinstein is currently on trial in LA for more sexual-assault charges – and is appealing his 23-year conviction in New York in 2020.

But, either way, audiences revel in the horrors of monsters – and here is one of the greatest monsters of modern times. And he barely features in the flesh.

Without him, this becomes a good but not brilliant story about journalism.

Once-in-a-lifetime scoops like this are addictive to read – and all-consuming for the few journalists who pull them off. They can make for good documentaries, but they don’t make for compulsive viewing as dramas unless you can add in some great cinematic moments.

All the President’s Men (1976) got a huge, dramatic boost from the appearances of Deep Throat, the informant who provided the vital ingredient to bring Nixon down.

The She Said story made for first-rate journalism and a first-rate book which collated the journalism. The film is a worthy reflection of excellent writing, but you’d be better off reading that writing rather than watching its dramatisation.

Read all about it: the real New York Times newsroom in She Said