Review: 'She Said' is a gripping account of the reporting that brought down Harvey Weinstein — and a smart look at how journalism gets done

It’s been years — maybe as far back as “All the President’s Men” in 1976 — that a movie has captured the craft and the passion of journalism as precisely and as smartly as director Maria Schrader’s “She Said.”

And, like that Redford/Hoffman movie about Watergate, “She Said” chronicles the real-life efforts of two journalists painstakingly investigating a story about a corrupted leader and the enablers who allowed him to avoid accountability.

The prologue introduces the concept, as New York Times reporter Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) works to follow up on the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape that almost — key word there, almost — derailed Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign to become president. Twohey is working this story while she is pregnant for the first time.

After the election, the story moves ahead five months, with news that right-wing host Bill O’Reilly was leaving Fox News over multiple sexual harassment accusations. The Times’ editors urge their reporters to start looking around for other instances of workplace harassment, and, as one editor, Rebecca Corbett (Patricia Clarkson), puts it, “interrogate the whole system.”

Reporter Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) starts with a tip that Harvey Weinstein, the powerful Hollywood mogul who led two companies — first Miramax, and then The Weinstein Company — had sexually harassed, abused and intimidated women, from famous actresses to lowly assistants. Kantor talks to a skeptical Twohey, who has seen women go public with such claims only to be dismissed, and convinces her to join her in investigating the story.

The two reporters work slowly, methodically, through dead ends, calls that end abruptly, and even a moment where a door is closed in their faces. Some women are willing to talk about their experiences, but for the longest time, no one will speak on the record. 

The way Schrader (who directed the German comedy “I’m Your Man” and episodes of the series “Unorthodox”) and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz (“Disobedience,” “Colette”) adapt Kantor and Twohey’s book (based on their reporting with Corbett) is a gripping demonstration of narrative restraint. The movie never re-enacts the scenes of sexual violence, but sometimes shows the location — an empty hotel room, usually — where those events took place. 

The telling of the stories is in the hands of the actresses playing those women, delivering chilling monologues about their encounters with Weinstein and the legal and personal hell that followed. The audience is learning the stories just as Kantor and Twohey did, by listening to them talk about what happened.

Some of those conversations are the best moments in the movie. Samantha Morton steals her one scene, as a former studio assistant who provides crucial documents to Kantor, and Jennifer Ehle is devastating as a woman looking back on what Harvey did to her 25 years earlier. And I have to mention Ashley Judd, who plays herself here, making the accusation that saying “no” to Weinstein in the ‘90s derailed her career.

Mercifully, the film makes no attempt to have an actor perform a full impersonation of Weinstein, which would have been comical and appalling in equal measure. Instead, a voice actor portrays Weinstein in phone calls, trying to cajole an unmoved Dean Baquet (Andre Braugher), the Times’ editor-in-chief, to give more time for Weinstein’s response to the accusations. The only time we see an in-the-flesh Weinstein is when he shows up in the Times’ newsroom, and we see only the back of his head.

In that scene, Mulligan shows extraordinary poise as Twohey, and she maintains that unflappable journalistic calm through the film. (There’s a notable exception, where she blows up at a guy trying to pick them up at a bar.) Kazan matches Mulligan well, as she gently interviews one woman after another, chipping away at the wall of silence surrounding Weinstein.

Together, Mulligan and Kazan make a strong reporting duo — as good as Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in “All the President’s Men” — with an important difference: As women digging into a story about women being harassed and abused and worse, Kantor and Twohey are allowed to show some empathy toward their subjects, and to allow their shared experiences as reporters and moms to let some emotion seep through. Their humanity doesn’t interfere with their journalism; it enhances the story, and reminds us that reporters are people, too.

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‘She Said’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language and depictions of sexual assault. Running time: 128 minutes.