Altercation: At the Movies

The film She Said, which played recently at both the 60th New York Film Festival and the 30th Hamptons International Film Festival, is based on the 2019 book of the same name by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey about the women who were victimized by the crimes of Harvey Weinstein and the two New York Times reporters’ quest to get their stories on the record. It’s the best movie about journalism since 2015’s Spotlight, and before that, 1976’s All the President’s Men. I’m saying this as a longtime (now former) journalism professor, not as a movie critic. Artistic issues aside, these are the movies that best demonstrate how high-level journalism really works; what a pain in the ass it is to try to get people who don’t want to talk to you to actually talk to you, and to only publish what you can prove. But occasionally, all this pays off. This film, as Kantor observed during the press conference that followed the NYFF premiere, “underlined everything we believe about journalism and put exclamation points at the end of it.”

She Said tells the story of how the two women did the reporting that led to their bombshell October 5, 2017, 3,300-word article. The two protagonists display none of the “swashbuckling cool” of Woodward and Bernstein. Rather, they are always polite, show a lot of empathy, and sometimes cry. Twohey does her work while fighting postpartum depression; Kantor, while juggling young kids. That their editor is a woman, as are most of the people they seek to convince to speak on the record, is appropriate, not only because the story is itself female-centric, but also because women have increasingly become dominant in the trade, no doubt in part because men are abandoning what is more and more a profession that demands a vow of virtual poverty.

The best thing about this movie is that it demonstrates just how damn difficult, time-consuming, and expensive responsible investigative reporting is; together with how little profit there is for the news organizations that undertake it. The Times risked much in backing these two reporters on their quest, so it’s nice that the paper finally got its movie: Spotlight was about The Boston Globe, President’s Men was about The Washington Post, and even Steven Spielberg’s movie about the Pentagon Papers, The Post, which was the Times’ story, was about guess which newspaper. Still, as the Marxists like to say, it’s “no coincidence” that it was the Times (together with The New Yorker) that finally broke the Weinstein story. Both are privately owned profitable publications with a readership that advertisers want to appeal to, and with readers willing to pay up. Such outlets are few and far between these days.

Since these stories originally ran, Weinstein was convicted in 2020 of two charges of committing a criminal sexual act in the first degree and third-degree rape. Not only is he serving a 23-year prison sentence, he is also standing trial for more in Los Angeles, and another trial is to take place later in London. Many corporate practices have changed, most especially in the entertainment world, thanks to the avalanche of women who eventually came forward to tell their stories.

Yes, the #MeToo movement has gone too far in some places. Sometimes, its proponents fail to make sufficient distinction between crimes and mere creepiness. Allegations are also treated by many people as facts. Innocent workplace flirting has a become a dangerous business. Nonetheless, such collateral damage is endemic to all cultural revolutions, and most sentient people will agree that the world is a better place thanks to these reporters and especially the women who risked their reputations and livelihoods to tell them the truth about Harvey Weinstein and his army of enablers.

I saw another valuable journalistically themed film that played at both the NYFF and HIFF: Claire Denis’s Stars at Noon. This one reflects the fact that—as I wrote back in September 2021—hardly anyone cares about Nicaragua anymore. Back in the bad old days, the U.S. was willing to not only fund and supply the Contras with deadly weapons, but mine the country’s harbors, hire death squads in nearby El Salvador, and help to enable and then lie on behalf of actual genocide in Guatemala. Elliott Abrams, the pardoned criminal now a senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, was the Reagan administration’s point man on all three, especially enabling the Guatemalan genocide.

The Denis Johnson novel the film is based on is set when all this action was going on, back in 1984. I spent some time in Nicaragua, as well as El Salvador and Guatemala, not long afterward, getting shot at by Contras, protected by Sandinista soldiers, and drinking in the bar of the Intercontinental Hotel, watching the arms dealers do their stuff and dining with lefty celebrities doing “Sandalista” tourism. It was great fun.

Claire Denis could have made a movie like the excellent Under Fire, with passionate, sexy journalists as heroes. Instead, the female American journalist/hero in this postrevolutionary film cannot sell any serious journalistic reporting to news organizations back home and is forced to literally prostitute herself to both rebels and government officials just to survive (as well as for $50 a throw to anyone drinking late in the hotel bar). Her former editor literally laughs in her face when she proposes serious story ideas. In the film as in life, Managua has become a hellscape—Donald Trump would call it a “shithole” country—but the CIA remains interested in ensuring that the right American companies get the oil rights. That, we eventually learn, is what all the killing turns on. (The movie was shot in Panama because making a movie in Nicaragua would likely be impossible these days.) The stars—Margaret Qualley and handsome Joe Alwyn—who gets the girl not only in this movie but also in Hulu’s Conversations With Friends—are both simultaneously lost, sympathetic, and inscrutable. If She Said explores a high point in mainstream journalism, Stars at Noon recounts the dregs of what’s left when there’s no superpower war going on and the journalism business therefore has no interest in what remains: a living nightmare.

I love my neighborhood and I hate how The New York Times is always trying to endear itself to allegedly “real” Americans by making nasty comments about it. Steve Coll’s review of Margaret Sullivan’s memoir contains this swipe: “She makes little effort to disguise her left-leaning politics, and while she makes her arguments clearly and with evidence, it’s difficult to identify an opinion that would cause much discomfort in reliably Democratic ZIP codes on the Upper West Side. She argues at length that The New York Times badly overplayed its coverage of Hillary Clinton’s email practices during the 2016 campaign, and she concludes that The Times certainly contributed to Clinton’s defeat.” Coll disputes this without evidence, but my point here is that the Times is located just below us Westsiders, and Coll, now of The New Yorker, was the dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, just above us. Many Columbia Journalism faculty, Times, and New Yorker staffers live around here. And yet in his review, Coll feels compelled to embody the paper’s self-hatred for the world’s best neighborhood, together with defensiveness for the paper’s all-but-undeniable role in helping to deliver the presidency to Donald Trump. He should be barred from Zabar’s for life.

Clip-and-Save Movie Lists
Other great movies about journalism, in (extremely) rough order:
His Girl Friday (perhaps the best dialogue, and delivery of that dialogue, of any film, ever)
Citizen Kane (well, obvi)
Groundhog Day (mostly because it’s one of the best comedies of all time)
Good Night, and Good Luck (gets points for being an excellent history lesson)
Ace in the Hole (it’s always been a nasty business)
The Philadelphia Story (wonderful movie, but loses points for its awful class politics)
The Killing Fields (also good history)
The Paper (criminally underrated)
Between the Lines (perhaps my favorite unknown movie)
Deadline – U.S.A. (those were the days …)
Call Northside 777 (those were also the days)
The Big Clock (still those days …)
Under Fire and Salvador (because they are sort of the same movie)
Almost Famous (just plain fun)
America’s Sweethearts (because I’m a sucker for rom-coms and also because you’ll be surprised by how smart this is; also, it destroys the notion that “entertainment journalism” is actually journalism; ditto: Morning Glory
Libeled Lady (back to those days …)
The Insider (should be paired with Good Night, and Good Luck to demonstrate the downward spiral of truth-telling when corporations take over …)
Network (for its historical significance and weird prophecy)
Broadcast News (because it’s there and pretty good)
Gentlemen’s Agreement (for its historical significance, primarily; otherwise, not so great)

The below are all moves I saw at either the NYFF or the HIFF and strongly recommend:
Decision to Leave
White Noise
One Fine Morning
Tár
Who Invited Charlie?

Movies that you should see because it will be, ahem, good for you:
Holy Spider

Movies that you should maybe see depending on who you are:
Master Gardener
Personality Crisis: One Night Only
Aftersun

Movies that you should see only if you want to see, like, a half-hour of people throwing up and have never seen the far superior Swept Away (the Wertmuller version, not the Madonna one) even though Woody Harrelson plays a Communist, Chomsky-quoting luxury cruise captain:
Triangle of Sadness

Recent dramatic films that also serve as excellent history lessons:
Till
Argentina, 1985 (not at either festival but releasing this week)