ARMOND WHITE: What Is the Worst Film of 2022?
She Said depends on lame emotionality while also absolving the media of its impact on public consciousness — supporting the elite-professional-class position on business, politics, and male–female relations is the only option. Those of us appalled that the front page of the Times has turned into Pravda are unlikely to root for Twohey-Rosen’s crusade.
She Said never takes us inside Hollywood practices — how agents intercede to negotiate an actor’s employment terms. Instead, personal, transactional, careerist behavior is elided, replaced by nightmare scenarios that contradict the age-old, consensual, casting-couch tradition.
Film producer and former Variety editor Peter Bart went outside the highly politicized trade media to IndieWire to complain about She Said’s clumsy narrative structure. Bart challenged the sentimentality that neglected Weinstein’s side of the media witch hunt and failed to provide a full, hiss-boo characterization of the villain. But he forgot that She Saidwas never intended to be art portraying a bad guy’s human side. A professional of Bart’s experience surely knows that Millennial Hollywood has turned into a partisan machine that dismisses equal justice the same way the Pelosi Congress has denied the J6 prisoners their due process.
As lame, weepy, and presumptuous as She Said is, its predictableness is actually tyrannical. The filmmakers figured that moviegoers would submit to the force of its biases, as with traditional media’s other outwardly political calumnies. So what if our social, cultural, and political experience is ruined by gaslighting?
In She Said the media no longer accurately report facts about contemporary issues or their own practices. Consider the TV-trite casting of Patricia Clarkson and Andre Braugher as Times executives — an appeal to the same bureaucratic fantasies in such network programs as All Rise, The Good Wife, The Good Fight, Veep, and The West Wing, all of which encourage viewer docility through the normalization of the power elite.
Pitt and friends disregard the New York Times’ political fetishization — the same partisanship you can see on any Sunday-morning chat show. Clarkson’s editrix Rebecca Corbett patronizes her cub reporters; she’s a mother-hen type evoking former Times exec Jill Abramson, who boasted about carrying an Obama doll in her purse. Braugher’s typage implausibly represents executive editor Dean Baquet’s biracial Creole power position, as if Braugher, the dark-skinned impersonator, could actually rise through the Gray Lady’s long-time white-collar, white-male echelon; it falsifies how upward mobility works in the privileged professions (an aberration of what Harvey Weinstein himself identified as “the Obama Effect”).
No wonder the public resisted She Said; it deprived us of seeing long-denied justice prevail; that used to be the hallmark of social-justice filmmaking. She Said could have been an enlightening screwball comedy, like He Said, She Said, the ’90s lark about internecine relations among journalists. (Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth Perkins played politically opposed reporters who fall in love. Mulligan and Kazan fall in love with white-girl vengeance.) So She Said deserved to flop.
Hollywood “inside baseball”-type movies have long flopped at the box office. Few people want to watch a film that feels like homework — there’s a reason why All the President’s Men starred Redford and Hoffman at the peak of their careers. Additionally, as I wrote in November, Hollywood and the DNC-MSM knew of Weinstein’s predatory ways, but both chose to look the other way for decades. Why would audiences reward them with a hit film?
