Telling the Woman’s Side of the Story: “She Said”

 

The first time I heard of Harvey Weinstein was back in my Roger Corman days, when Harvey and brother Bob formed Miramax (named after their parents) to produce and distribute international art films. Roger had paved the way by showing that serious foreign-language films like Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers and Fellini’s Amarcord could make money in U.S.  markets. When Miramax came along and upped the ante, Roger went back to genre flicks. Miramax, meanwhile, distributed such offbeat hits as Pulp Fiction and The Crying Game, while also entering the production field. The company eventfully nabbed a Best Picture Oscar for 1998’s Shakespeare in Love, while being involved with many other classy projects.

 If Miramax sealed Harvey Weinstein’s reputation as a strong, hands-on producer, it took a while for the world to discover that Weinstein was hands-on in a more unfortunate sense. In 2020 his apparently insatiable demand for sexual favors from actresses and staffers earned him a 23-year prison term in New York, and a Los Angeles jury has just convicted him of heinous crimes. So it’s no secret today that Weinstein is capable of sexual harassment, even rape, But his behavior was still an industry secret back in 2017 when two female reporters on the New York Times, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, began investigating rumors of his mistreatment of women. Their groundbreaking articles showed the world Weinstein’s dark side, and encouraged scores of additional women to come forward. Eventually Kantor and Twohey turned their reporting into a 2019 book, She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement. And now that book is a movie, with a strong cast led by Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan.is IHis in

 If you’ve ever had a yen to be an investigative journalist, you’ll find She Said both fascinating and daunting. The film makes clear that reporters spend most of their days (and nights) far from their laptops. Before they can tap out the stories that will change people’s lives, they devote days, weeks, even months to tracking down cold leads. They’re forever phoning potential informants who hang up on them, and traveling great distances to have doors slammed in their faces. Somehow, even in the face of rejection, they know what to say, and are able to remain sympathetic to victims who just can’t bring themselves to tell what they know. Which means this two-hour film seems very long indeed, as we watch Jodi and Megan doggedly try to overcome all obstacles that will keep them from uncovering the truth.

 After watching the two cajole members of Weinstein’s inner circle over cups of coffee and glasses of wine, we see them wearily trying to keep their home fires lit. In real life both women have husbands who are themselves involved in writing professions (one a columnist, one a literary agent). In the film, all we know is that these guys are remarkably sympathetic to their wives’ overtime work obligations, despite the fact that there are young children who need attention. (Kantor’s spouse takes it in stride when, on a day’s notice, she jets off first to California and then to London in the line of duty.)  It’s  a far cry from the traditional Hollywood movie in which the man leaves on an exciting but difficult mission, while his wife stays home, worrying about his safety and keeping the kids in line.

 When the breakthrough moments do come, and when there’s finally enough on-the-record material to print a Weinstein exposé, we do feel a real sense of accomplishment. Too bad it’s such a slog to get there. 

Raising Cain: 1981’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice”

Watching 1946’s The Postman Always Rings Twice set me off on a path you might call obsessive. First I checked out the 1981 remake starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, notorious in its day for its frank sexuality. Then, to better understand the source of it all, I read James M. Cain’s pulp novella from 1934. 

 To be honest, the 1981 remake didn’t do much for me. Yes, that initial sex scene is startling in its brutal power, but it gave me far more than I needed in setting the scene for what was to follow. There’s only so much of a sexually voracious Jack Nicholson that someone like me can take. His nearly devouring Jessica Lange in his brutal embrace just made me squirmy (and certainly made me wonder about her character’s basic intelligence, since she seems to welcome it).  Maybe, I figured, sado-masochism works better on the page than on the screen. The great Sven Nykvist’s cinematography was a marvel, though, in keeping the couple’s private parts completely hidden even while clothes were ripped away.

 Along with Nykvist, who was Ingmar Bergman’s longtime cinematographer, the remake attracted a host of top-grade professionals. The director was Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces), and none other than playwright David Mamet adapted Cain’s work for the screen. Part of the hype at the time of the film’s release was that it was far closer to Cain’s original work that the sanitized Production Code version of 1946.  That’s why I wanted to understand what Cain was up to.

 No question: Cain in this work closely aligns sex with death. The novella contains at least three major scenes of erotic connection between the narrator, Frank, and his boss’s wife, Cora. In the first, coming onto Cora in the kitchen of her husband’s roadside lunchroom, he says. “I took her in my arms and mashed my mouth up against hers.”  She’s the one who pleads for him to bite her . . .  and he does: “I sank my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down my neck when I carried her upstairs.” 

 The second big scene of passion occurs immediately after they manage to maneuver her soused immigrant husband (scornfully referred to as The Greek) over the side of a California cliff. To suggest that the car crash is pure accident, Frank roughs up Cora by punching her in the eye. Next thing you know, they are locked in each other’s arms. And Frank admits that “Hell could have opened for me then, and it wouldn’t have made any difference. I had to have her, if I hung for it.” Then he adds, “I had her.”

 For all that the film remake tries to capture Cain’s tone, it just doesn’t pull us along in the way that Frank’s on-the-page narration does. Yes, there are the same plot twists and turns, including some sneaky legal wranglings that briefly have the lovers at each other’s throat. And the remake also includes the novella’s bizarre interlude in which Frank, separated from Cora, takes up with a dame who raises pumas and other exotic jungle cats. (The original film had him tempted by a much more commonplace lady.) On screen this cat-woman is played, apparently in the buff, by Anjelica Huston, Nicholson’s real-life main squeeze at the time.

 One more thing the remake doesn’t have is the novella’s powerful ending, in which we learn for the first time just where Frank is as he tells us his tale. It’s the capper we need to understand everything.

 

Paris (Texas) When It Sizzles

 I’ve discovered that there really is a place called Paris, Texas. It’s in the northeast east of the state, just spitting distance from the Oklahoma border, and in 2020 its population was 24,000 souls. But in Wim Wenders’1984  film—financed and shot by an international consortium—Paris, Texas is more of a state of mind. It’s one of the first phrases uttered (well, sort of) by a down-and-out drifter to the brother who’s come to rescue him after a four-year absence. And it’s a closely-guarded snapshot of a patch of desert scrub that looks to be in the middle of nowhere. Paris, Texas, eventually, takes on the aura of a dream-state in which nostalgia fuses with a joyous sense of love and connection and future promise, at least for some.

 Wenders’ movie never literally takes the viewer to Paris, Texas. But his European camera-eye (highlighting the work of the brilliant Dutch cinematographer Robby Mūller) deeply loves the state’s wide-open spaces, using natural light to capture them in all their glory. The road-trip aspect of the narrative allows Wenders and Mūller to explore tumble-down towns, seedy motels, and the desert itself. But big cities are part of their vision too. Los Angeles, the end of the road for some aspects of the story, has never looked so beautiful, with its hillside suburban homes basking in the hazy west coast sunlight. And the skyscrapers of Downtown Houston glow in the urban dusk.

 Because Wenders’ canon was largely unknown to me, I expected Paris, Texas to be arty, mostly a feat of cinematography, with human relationships getting short shrift. How wrong I was! The raggedy man painfully inching his way across the desert in the opening frames turns out to have a complex and deeply moving backstory. Some two hours later, we finally find out what’s troubling him, and all the pieces of an emotional storyline click into place. The drifter, a native Texan named Travis, is played by classic Hollywood character actor Harry Dean Stanton in a bravura performance that allows him to register all the emotions: pain, anger, whimsy, gratitude, regret. Others in the international cast include Dean Stockwell as Travis’s good-hearted brother, Aurore Clêment as that brother’s deeply maternal wife, and eight-year-old Hunter Carson (son of actress Karen Black and screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson) in a movingly natural portrayal of a boy abandoned by his birth parents years before. Late in the film there’s an important appearance by Nastassja Kinski as a fragile-looking blonde in a peepshow booth. For a while her Texas drawl, belying her German roots, had me completely fooled. But the key scenes in which Travis shares his story  with her from the far side of the glass have a visual and emotional power I will not soon forget.

 The filmmakers involved with this project are an impressive bunch. Second unit was shot by France’s Claire Denis, who went on to become a film director of note. Allison Anders, another significant director in the making (see Gas Food Lodging), served as a production assistant. The original screenplay is by Sam Shepard, the Oscar-nominated actor who as a playwright can be considered a poet of wide open spaces. (L.M. Kit Carson is credited with the adaptation.)

 All in all, this is a motion picture worth seeing and savoring, for its sensitive performances as well as its visual beauty. I’ll give the last word to a fan who posted on IMDB: “Perhaps each person has a film -- usually a masterpiece -- which affects him or her so strongly that it is beyond description. This is mine.”