She Said (2022, Maria Schrader) (Patreon)

50/100

Weird division of dramaturgical labor here: Mulligan, who's quietly superb (at least when she's not required to anchor blunt single-scene lectures on the uniquely female trials that are postpartum depression and fending off assholes at bars), does most of the active journalism, while Kazan sits and listens to one harrowing testimonial after another, as if she were Claude Lanzmann or Wang Bing (neither of whom constantly cuts to reaction shots in which they gaze sorrowfully and compassionately at the speaker as she recounts past abuse). Still, the main problem, for anyone who paid even marginal attention to this story when it broke all of five years ago, is that She Said functions almost entirely as a choppy précis, tossing in elements of Twohey and Kantor's personal lives only insofar as those will remind us that both are working moms (I did appreciate their husbands assuming the blandly supportive role that male crusaders' wives invariably do) and showing precious little interest in the nuts and bolts of investigative reporting, even relative to a solid workhorse like Spotlight, much less All the President's Men. Or maybe it's that the film is hamstrung by most of said nuts and bolts involving necessarily respectful, low-key efforts to get Weinstein's victims on the record, so that Kantor unexpectedly receiving a call from Ashley Judd, who's finally agreed to be a named source, serves as its big teary-huggy climax. You can suddenly see what's been missing when Peter Friedman—in his finest showcase since welcoming Carol to Wrenwood—shows up as Lanny Davis; both of his scenes generate an invigorating spark of polite tension, digging into the thorny adversarial negotiations between those paid to publish damning information (wish Ronan Farrow's competing story had gotten more play) and those paid to bury it. That's just so much more compelling than a dramatic reading of the article's traumatic incidents, however movingly acted by greats like Jennifer Ehle and (newly appearing before my personal eyeballs for the first time since Cosmopolis, a decade ago) Samantha Morton. Can't blame Schrader for mostly following The Assistant's lead and obscuring Harvey, but his obsession with whether Gwyneth Paltrow will be part of the story is so darkly funny that I wish there'd been more of him. I'm Your Man showed some promise, but this one's 96% dutiful; as everyone gathered around one computer at the end, I thought "Oh, the final shot will be the cursor clicking 'Publish,' cut to black, roll credits," and that's exactly what happened two minutes or so later.