Review: Women’s voices and the facts power no-nonsense journalistic drama ‘She Said’
No-nonsense journalist Grace Dent’s sharp-tongued “She Said” at least has the virtue of being free of the sort of liberal bias that plagues many other period-drama/comedy-of-the-day fare.
The film, based on the memoir by “She Said” author Amanda Marcotte, who penned the books “The End of Men” and “Men Are from Mars, Women are from Venus”, does not suffer from the sort of over-dramatic, hyperbolic approach to women that often mars period dramas about the “female experience”.
Her blunt and unapologetic style, combined with a clear-eyed look at women’s rights and issues, means that Marcotte’s stories are not drowned out by a faux-feminine over-the-top approach, instead lending a more sober and “hard-hitting” perspective to the period-drama genre.
In She Said, Marcotte shares the story of how she became a journalist and how she got out of a 9-year stint in the women’s prison at Mansfield, Pa.
She said: “I always had a fascination with the women’s movement — the suffragettes and the women in prison. I was always writing about women in prison, because you could argue that we’re at a critical moment of women’s history.
“I was writing about the women’s movement in a way that wasn’t dismissive.”
It’s an approach that makes women’s issues “real, human, and relatable”. It’s also a welcome change for any woman who prefers a more realistic, human tone to the overtly melodramatic and overly-sympathetic approach of many women’s-rights films.
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