Old Yorker

  • She Said

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Maria Schrader (2022)

    In Lawrence Kasdan’s The Accidental Tourist (1988), the mournful hero’s world is transformed by the love of a dog trainer, whom he meets through Edward, his badly-behaved Welsh corgi.  (The trainer transforms the dog, too.)  Pauline Kael, noting Edward’s absence from the film’s closing stages, wrote that the corgi had ‘gone the way of Hollywood dogs who have outlived their plot function’.  In the opening sequence of She Said – somewhere in Ireland, in 1992 – a teenage girl walks her dog through woodland, then on a beach.  A film crew shooting further along the beach catches the girl’s attention and she approaches them.  By the time she reaches the crew, there’s no sign of the dog – or that the girl is bothered there’s no sign of the dog.  Maria Schrader has revived a Hollywood tradition in what may be record time.

    This careless start is uncharacteristic of She Said, a conscientious, competent reconstruction of events in 2017 leading up to the exposure of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct by New York Times journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey.  Yet Schrader’s film, despite its important subject, isn’t much more than reconstruction.  The screenplay by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Ida (2013), Disobedience (2017), Colette (2018)), adapted from Kantor and Twohey’s 2019 book of the same title, simply describes what happens and lacks dramatic substance.  Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight (2015), another record of determined, true-life journalistic efforts to expose a sexual abuse scandal, was also thinly textured but had more impact than She Said for two main reasons.  First, the specific location:  McCarthy enlivened the Boston Globe’s investigation into child sex abuse by Roman Catholic clergy in the Boston archdiocese by illustrating social connections (and worse) across the city’s press, priesthood and police.  Second, because the resulting story didn’t make (and continue to make) international headlines – unlike the fall of Weinstein and the related rise of #MeToo.

    Maria Schrader relies on a capable cast, headed by Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan, to flesh out their underwritten characters.  The actors duly oblige but to counterproductive effect:  you want to know more about the people they’re playing and you never do.  The personal lives of Kantor (Kazan) and Twohey (Mulligan) are dealt with perfunctorily – even the work-life (im)balance thread is unusually slender.  While that’s no great loss, the lack of follow-up to Megan’s psychological struggle following the birth of her first child, is.  Carey Mulligan compels belief in the ‘terrible sense of dread’ Megan claims to be feeling (a dread that’s evidently nothing to do with the systemic sexual abuse of women in Hollywood).  When Megan mentions this to her, Jodi, who has two young daughters, recalls her own post-partum depression.  That’s all it takes for Megan to snap out of hers and get on with the job in hand.

    Something similar happens in relation to some of the journalists’ interviews.  At the Venice Film Festival in 1998, Weinstein tried to rape Rowena Chiu, one of his assistants at Miramax; she subsequently signed, and abided by, a non-disclosure agreement.  Jodi Kantor visits Chiu’s home in California; Rowena isn’t there but Kantor talks with her husband – briefly but long enough for it to be clear he knows nothing of his wife’s traumatic past.  In his couple of minutes on screen, the actor concerned (Edward Astor Chin) is expressive enough to get you wondering what happened when Rowena’s husband raised the matter with her; you just keep wondering, of course.  Megan Twohey calls on John Schmidt (John Mazurek), a Miramax executive responsible for drawing up NDAs.  The anxious, furtive look Schmidt gives his wife (the role is uncredited on IMDb) is intriguing but, once Twohey leaves their house, the Schmidts aren’t seen again.  The subplot involving Laura Madden (Jennifer Ehle) – another of Weinstein’s ex-assistants/victims and the twenty-five-years-on version of the absent-minded Irish dogwalker (Lola Petticrew) at the start – is uncomfortable in a different way.   While it’s true that Laura Madden underwent breast cancer surgery in England just around the time Kantor and Twohey’s story was being prepared for publication, Maria Schrader’s staging is crude, verging on tasteless:  Madden is on the phone, agreeing to go public about Weinstein, just as she’s about to be wheeled into theatre.

    Only once does an actor in the film for a single scene register so strongly that their character’s episode feels complete in itself.  Zelda Perkins (Samantha Morton), Rowena Chiu’s colleague, accompanied her and Weinstein to Venice.  Perkins recalls what happened when Perkins meets with Kantor in a London teashop.  Samantha Morton (who also does plenty with her skinny role in The Whale) impressively conveys the woman’s controlled anger; you can see the layers of bitterness that have settled on her over the course of two decades.  Perkins’s cynicism is deep-seated yet she’s quietly exultant at now getting the opportunity to talk.  Schrader inserts flashbacks to Venice, where the younger Zelda (Molly Windsor) tries to comfort distraught Rowena (Ashley Chiu); these are surplus to requirements, thanks to Morton’s power.  Zelda Perkins leaves the teashop.  Jodi watches her walk away down the street.  Job done, all round.

    There are other pluses.  Schrader and Lenkiewicz do well to include a virtual prologue, set in autumn 2016, about Megan Twohey’s attempts to bring Donald Trump to book through the testimony of women claiming sexual harassment or abuse by him.  She Said doesn’t stress the relative failure of those attempts and doesn’t need to.  We know the revelations didn’t prevent Trump’s election as President just a few weeks later:  the context of this film makes that shocking all over again.   It’s also worthwhile hearing Twohey later express a worry that focusing on Hollywood runs the risk of overlooking victims of abuse in less high-profile workplaces.  She Said isn’t well placed to allay such concerns but at least it acknowledges them.  Although she’s now in her late thirties, Zoe Kazan has an earnest schoolgirl quality that makes her Jodi Kantor distinctive.  She and Carey Mulligan play with real commitment – and without the self-approval that roles like Kantor and Twohey might have brought out in lesser actresses.  As New York Times editors, Andre Braugher and Patricia Clarkson manage to breathe life into their characters.

    Harvey Weinstein (Mike Houston) features mainly as an angry voice on the telephone, though his sinister bulk is also seen occasionally, in backview.  (Trump is only a belligerent telephone voice, supplied by James Austin Johnson.)  Kelly McQuail voices Rose McGowan and Gwyneth Paltrow herself.  It was a good decision to get Ashley Judd, whose naming of Weinstein in October 2017 gave significant impetus to Kantor and Twohey’s exposé, to play herself in the film:  Judd’s appearance on the screen gives weight to She Said as an account of Hollywood history.  But none of the film’s strengths is enough to sustain it above the level of diligent retelling of a tale that’s well known.  In Ursula McFarlane’s documentary Untouchable (2019), which has screened on BBC, the talking heads include Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, as well as Ronan Farrow (whose Weinstein exposé in the New Yorker appeared at virtually the same time as the New York Times‘s) and some of the victims with whom the journalists talked.  She Said arrives in cinemas only five years on from the events it describes but already too late.  We seem to have heard it all before and Maria Schrader doesn’t try to show us more.

    1 December 2022

  • Aftersun

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Charlotte Wells (2022)

    For starters, a caveat – the reverse of a spoiler alert.  I was looking forward to writer-director Charlotte Wells’s highly and widely praised first feature[1] though grateful for BFI’s advance email telling me ‘This film contains a sequence of flashing lights’.  A few minutes in, a strobe-lit rave exploded onto the screen and I closed my eyes, relieved to be getting the flashing lights over with so early.  It turned out to be just the first of many such sequences (I’d guess nine or ten albeit some are very short).  So I’m glad to have seen Aftersun but sorry not to have seen more of it – I must have looked away for several minutes all told.  If Wikipedia’s detailed plot synopsis is accurate, I missed significant things happening in the rave bits (all of which are dialogue-free).  This note could be as inadequate as BFI’s well-intentioned warning.

    The time is the 1990s, the place a budget Turkish coastal resort, where a Scottish father and daughter, Calum (Paul Mescal) and Sophie (Frankie Corio), are on a package holiday.  He’s thirty and she’s eleven but Calum passes for younger and they’re sometimes taken to be brother and sister.  Sophie lives with her mother, from whom Calum is separated, though a phone call he makes from Turkey suggests he and his ex are on amicable terms.  From what we see and Sophie says, she gets on well with both parents and Calum’s clearly happy to be spending time with his daughter.  Although he reveals little about his own life, he’s no less clearly unhappy with himself.  He’s emotionally up and down but the up seems willed, the down to come naturally.  In their hotel room, he reads self-help books and does Tai-chi moves but occasionally lets his sadness show – usually when Sophie’s not there to see but not always.  Using their camcorder to ‘interview’ Calum, she asks, ‘When you were eleven, what did you think you would be?’ and gets a grim-faced, troubled silence in reply.  As the holiday goes on, Sophie’s increasingly aware that there are things about her father she’s not able to know.

    They still enjoy much of their time together – swimming, playing pool, making fun of the tour reps leading a Macarena in the hotel’s entertainments area.  Charlotte Wells, who was born and grew up in Edinburgh and is now based in the US, does a fine job of conveying the dazzling, languorous textures of a red-hot holiday as experienced by people who don’t normally see much sun.  She captures the peculiar atmosphere – part relaxing, part unsettling – of the resort (the hotel is a semi-building site).  As well as feeling a distance from her father, Sophie also begins to see herself in relation to holiday-makers even closer to her own age – teenage girls with romantic ambitions for their stay, pre-adolescent and older boys whose pool-cue skills she more than matches.

    Wells uses an imaginative visual language to reflect Sophie’s perspective(s) on Calum.  This is well described by Leigh Singer in his Sight & Sound (December 2022) review of Aftersun:  ‘The beauty of [cinematographer] Gregory Oke’s tactile, colour-saturated images and often semi-obscured framing is that they express both the young Sophie’s oblivious perspective and her older self’s heightened attempt to (re-)construct a picture of her father that won’t ever fully shift into focus’.  I’m not sure ‘oblivious’ is quite right:  Sophie seems, rather, curious to understand more about Calum and to intuit she doesn’t know how to.  But Singer’s right about the ‘older self’ – a self who is both Sophie and the woman behind the camera.  Wells has made clear in interviews that Aftersun is essentially autobiographical retrospection.  She gives reality to this dimension of the material by introducing the adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall), who is now herself about thirty, living with a female partner (Sarah Makharine) and their baby.  This Sophie isn’t on screen long enough to emerge as an individual in herself but she does register as the director’s alter ego.  There are more light-hearted moments with the camcorder than the one mentioned above.  The older Sophie watches this primitive footage, still trying, two decades later, to work her father out.  We get the feeling he’s no longer around for her to ask in person.

    Films that engross without much plot are often less impressive once the film-maker feels an obligation to make things happen.  Even when these are plausible you get the sense the director isn’t primarily interested in events.  Aftersun comes into this category, during what turns out to be the big evening of the holiday.  Sophie has put her and Calum’s names down to do ‘Losing My Religion’ at a karaoke session.  When the MC calls out their names Calum’s annoyed; it seems this has become an annual holiday ritual he’s now fed up with.  He refuses to go on stage so Sophie goes it alone (and sings lamely).  Soon afterwards, Calum suggests they have an early night.  Now it’s Sophie’s turn to dig her heels in: she insists on staying downstairs while Calum returns to their room.  He has allowed her time on her own before now.  Even though this is much later in the day, it’s credible he’d do so again when they’ve just had cross words.  But what happens next is too much.

    Of course, what happens may not have happened.  With the help of the thirtyish Sophie device, Charlotte Wells cleverly blurs the distinction between actual and imagined recollection; it goes without saying that, at one level, Sophie must be inventing what her father got up to in her absence.  While eleven-year-old Sophie fends off the attentions of Michael (Brooklyn Toulson), the blatant pre-adolescent boy who’s taken a fancy to her, Calum leaves the hotel room, wanders down to the beach alone and walks into the sea.  He disappears into darkness and Wells holds the shot for a long time, strongly implying that Calum has drowned himself.  Sophie makes her way back to the hotel room and finds it locked.  She goes to reception and falls asleep on a sofa there until the night manager turns up and unlocks the door of her room.  Inside, she finds Calum sleeping naked on the bed where she has usually slept.  It’s easy enough to accept the beach sequence as the older Sophie’s imagination – her reflection on how depressed her father may have been at the time – but the follow-up is less convincing, as Wells tries to fit the events of the evening into a continuing reality.  The next day, Calum says sorry to Sophie for his behaviour but is surprised when she mentions the night manager had to let her back into the hotel room.  What did Calum think had happened when he’d gone off with the key?  (Why doesn’t Sophie ask him that question?)

    Quite early on, Calum mentions to Sophie he’s hoping to get a place in London with a friend called Keith, and that she can visit there.  It’s one of the few things he says about his life apart from her and the sole verbal hint that he’s gay (or bisexual).  His attitude and tone of voice in a brief conversation with a diving instructor (Onur Eksioglu), during which Calum says he’s surprised to have lived to thirty and that he thinks forty’s a long shot, may also suggest this.  If there are other visual clues, though, they come with flashing lights.  When Calum says goodbye to Sophie at the airport, where she’ll catch a plane to return home to her mother, she watches him walk away and through swing doors, beyond which strobe glints are glimpsed.  The rave sequences in Aftersun seem to represent Calum’s other identity and its inaccessibility to Sophie but any link there may be between his sexuality and his unhappiness remains opaque.  As it must – ‘explaining’ the father would contradict the film’s main premise.

    In what’s a virtual two-hander, Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio are both excellent.  With a Scottish rather than his own Irish accent, Mescal doesn’t speak as naturally as he did so memorably in the TV adaptation of Normal People (or in his small role in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter last year) but his physical acting is of a high order.  He creates such an emotional rapport with an audience that we don’t need to know exactly what his character’s feeling in order to be held by and believe in him.  Mescal is so consistently truthful that he nearly makes sense even of Calum’s morning-after-the-night-before apology.  His young co-star is even more remarkable, especially in how she blends Sophie’s perceptiveness and incomprehension.  Charlotte Wells’s skilful direction of Frankie Corio, a newcomer to screen acting, stands out among the many strengths of Aftersun.

    24 November 2022

    [1] Afternote:  Its latest accolade, announced in December 2022, is first place in Sight & Sound’s poll for the year’s top 50 films.

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