SHE SAID
Tonight Susie, Todd and I went to the first movie in a movie theater that I have been to in three years. It was in the little 60 seat Grail Theater in the River Arts District of Asheville with plush comfortable seats. It was a long movie and we knew the ending before we sat down and yet it was riveting.
The most important thing for the three of us is that this blockbuster film coming out at the most auspicious time of the year for a film release was directed by Susie’s cousin, my wife Kathe’s brother Hinnerk’s daughter, Maria Schrader.
We’d read the rave reviews in the New York Times and the Washington Post so we weren’t nervous for Maria, but I, at least, didn’t expect to be so gripped by the movie, knowing the outcome.
The movie was about the fall of Harvey Weinstein but it wasn’t really about Weinstein at all, whom we only got to see once from the back of his head. It was about the women whom he had sexually molested and bullied who had such a hard time coming out and being heard and most of all the story of two New York Times women reporters and the difficulties they had in unraveling Weinstein’s ruthless power and most of all in getting anyone to speak up on the record. It was also a complete lesson, without being preachy, in why sexual harassment by powerful men has so often been enabled or excused. All of us in the audience, mostly women, were mesmerized all the way through and all clapped at the end.
The two women reporters, in fact all the women, were shown embedded with their families, living normal family lives, at the same time as the two reporters were so doggedly chasing down lead after lead, dead end after dead end, of silenced and threatened women.
There was nothing glamorous or sensational in the settings or the action, no sexual violence shown, just the slow, methodical step by step search by two women for the truth and the willingness of molested women to finally be able to speak up. No one was beautiful or sexy and the pain they felt was very human, often traumatic, pain.
It was just a terrific movie and will have huge impact on anyone who sees it. And to think that every actor selected, every close or distant shot, every movement, the very rapid pace from phone call to interview, to frustrated searching, often bouncing from place to place, the choices of banal settings even in glamorous New York was selected by my niece and Susie’s cousin, Maria Schrader, who played in the yard with Susie 4 and my 6 year old son, Tom, in Winsen, Germany 50 years ago. Kathe, my wife, who died a year ago, would have been beaming.
Maria directed Unorthodox, a Netflix series a few years ago and won an Emmy as best director of a television film series. Who knows what awards she will win for She Said. We are all so proud of her and urge you to see the film.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 