Is there anything left to say about Harvey Weinstein? The mogul’s name used to be synonymous with Oscars, box office success, and a bull-in-a-china-shop style of managing Hollywood talent and publicity. Now, 15 months after the stories that broke the dam, he’s a one-man avatar for the #MeToo movement, a potent symbol, and a pariah.
Weinstein has been so thoroughly reported on that it’s hard to imagine that a film could bring much more to his story. Indeed, Ursula Macfarlane’s new documentary Untouchable doesn’t go for shocking revelation ions or new insights. Anyone who’s followed the Weinstein story reasonably closely will know what’s coming, from Weinstein’s early career as a music promoter to his rise as a hotshot movie executive and his eventual downfall.
But to say its tale is familiar isn’t a knock on the film. What makes Untouchable worthy is how and where it chooses to tell that tale. With a figure like Weinstein, it’s hard not to allow him to suck all the air out of the room, even in disgrace. So Untouchable makes the smart choice to push him into the background of his own story, and on his own turf.
Untouchable’s premiere at Sundance is especially significant
That Untouchable opened at the Sundance Film Festival is itself a rebuke, both to the man at its center and, in subtler ways, to the industry culture that enabled him for so long.
Sundance is where Weinstein made his reputation, beginning in 1989, when Weinstein and his brother Bob, still trying to grow their fledgling production company Miramax into a powerhouse, spotted Sex, Lies, and Videotape at the festival. It was the feature film debut from then-newbie Steven Soderbergh, who was only 26 at the time. The Weinsteins bought the film, which won the audience prize at Sundance, and a few months later went on to win the Palme d’Or — one of the biggest honors in world cinema — at the Cannes Film Festival. Within a year, Soderbergh had been nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the 1990 Oscars, and the Weinsteins were a force to be reckoned with.
That sale also lit a fire under Sundance, which became known as a place for distributors to sniff out and propel the next big thing to stardom. And the Weinsteins were at the forefront, with a reputation for driving a hard bargain, recutting films, and turning them into hits. For the next two decades, they repeated that strategy with movies like Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Kevin Smith’s Clerks, Todd Field’s In the Bedroom, Tom McCarthy’s The Station Agent, and Zach Braff’s Garden State.
So in many ways, Sundance and the Weinsteins were symbiotic for decades. Harvey was a fixture at the festival as well as other film festivals.
But Sundance was also the location where Harvey Weinstein allegedly assaulted at least two of the dozens of women who’ve accused him of sexual misconduct — activist and former actress Rose McGowan, who settled with Weinstein for $100,000 following the incident, and actress Louisette Geiss.
Weinstein’s absence was notable at Sundance in 2018, where the festival’s director, John Cooper, reaffirmed that Weinstein was “not welcome.” And Jodi Kantor, one of the New York Times journalists who broke the story about Weinstein’s decades of alleged abuse, spoke at the festival about the power of accumulated stories of the women Weinstein is said to have targeted.
But it’s been hard for anyone to forget that Weinstein’s behavior was one of the industry’s open secrets for decades, and the subject of many whisper networks. Untouchable reminds us of that with a few pop culture references — like a 2012 scene from 30 Rock — that not-so-obliquely referenced Weinstein’s predatory behavior on young women hoping to make it big in Hollywood.
After all, Weinstein’s alleged assault of McGowan occurred in 1997. Geiss’s occurred in 2008. And Sundance is hardly the only organization that’s been navigating a post-Weinstein world — his specter hung heavy over Cannes as well in 2018, where other assaults are alleged to have taken place as far back as 1997.
(Weinstein has repeatedly denied the accusations made against him; he is currently facing charges of rape and sexual assault in New York State.)
Untouchable doesn’t let the film industry off the hook, instead probing the obvious question: How could the people who knew that something was happening simply look away? Some of the people who had heard “stories” — including a number of former Miramax executives — are among the interviewees in Untouchable, talking about their suspicions at the time and regrets now that they waved away his behavior. (The film notes that Weinstein’s brother Bob, who does not appear in the film, claims he did not know about Harvey’s behavior until the New York Times and New Yorker stories broke in October 2017.)
And at Sundance that’s an uncomfortable but necessary question to ask, and keep asking, in a public forum. Untouchable isn’t a cure-all, but it’s part of a much bigger industry-wide reckoning that must continue into the future, even as various figures implicated for similar actions attempt comebacks.
In Untouchable, the voices of Weinstein’s accusers are re-centered in a way only cinema can achieve
There’s a second way that Untouchable works against Weinstein. While denying multiple accusations of rape and sexual assault, he’s maintained that all of his relationships and sexual encounters with women were consensual, and thus, he and his legal team argue, they have no basis for claiming his actions were illegal. The Hollywood casting couch, the argument goes, has been around as long as Hollywood. These women just wanted to make it big in Hollywood; of course they’d sleep with a powerful man like Weinstein. Don’t women do it all the time?
There are plenty of reasons this argument is reprehensible, but Untouchable, as a film, has one of the most powerful reasons of all: the testimony of women targeted by Weinstein. Newspaper and magazine stories can tell us the details, but cinema, an image- and time-based medium, can do what print cannot. It can make us sit with victims and serve as witnesses while they recount their experiences.
As Vox’s Constance Grady noted recently while writing about another alleged serial sexual abuser, musician R. Kelly, and Surviving R. Kelly, the documentary about him:
#MeToo set the stage for outrage against Kelly, but plenty of stories about him came out post-Weinstein that didn’t have the same effect that the documentary did. There seems to have been something uniquely unsettling about watching survivors and their loved ones recount their experiences rather than reading about them, about seeing a lineup of women quietly weep as they try to talk about the worst thing that ever happened to them.
Untouchable does this in a way that’s wholly convincing, letting women tell the stories of their encounters with Weinstein firsthand. The accounts span decades, stretching all the way back to his time as a music promoter in Buffalo in the 1970s and continuing through the decades following. And the film doesn’t let the audience look away. We sit with the women as they struggle to explain what happened, and to weigh the effects that Weinstein had on their lives. We hear how similar the details of their alleged assaults are, and witness the pattern emerging.
By the end, there’s little doubt that we’ve been watching truth-tellers, especially as the film makes the smart choice to limit Weinstein’s presence to the stories of his accusers and former associates, plus some archival photographs. He appears in almost no moving images.
That means we’re seeing a portrait of a man painted by those who either knew him well or were forced into knowing him. The resulting image is an aggressive, controlling, insecure, power-hungry, abusive figure who wasn’t afraid to take away other people’s rights, autonomy, and livelihood in order to get his way.
It’s not easy to push a figure like Harvey Weinstein to the margins of his own story. But a film like Untouchable, debuting as Weinstein’s legal team is still trying to assert his control of the narrative, vitally focuses on the voices of those whom he most profoundly affected. That makes it a necessary part of the story — and a vital document of women regaining control of their own narrative, too.
Untouchable premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. It is awaiting acquisition.