Untouchable (9/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 98 minutes.

NR.

This is really a portrait of evil, a fat slob who made lots of award-winning films but who abused his power by abusing and exploiting women. It’s told mostly by his victims, and their stories are hair-raising.

While it starts with Harvey Weinstein and his brother, Bob, in Buffalo as concert promoters, it quickly seques into their success in the movie business. In no time at all Harvey is on top of the world and of every woman of whom he can take advantage.

Directed by Ursula Macfarlane, it includes interviews with writers Ken Auletta and Ronan Farrow, who finally broke the story that had been a well-known secret for years if not decades. These are short, however. The most harrowing parts of the films are the women themselves, including Ericka Rosenbaum, Rosanna Arquette, Caitlin Dulany, Paz de la Huerta, among others telling their stories in detail. The stories are like out of a horror film.

Missing, however, are people like Mira Sorvino, who won the Best Supporting Actress award for 1995 for Woody Allen’s Mighty Aprhodite (1995) who blames Weinstein for damaging her career when she rejected his advances, and Gwenyth Paltrow, who won the Oscar® for Weinstein’s Shakespeare in Love (1999) who has accused Weinstein of sexually harassing her. It took courage for the ones who did appear to tell their stories for this film. Since Sorvino and Paltrow are already on record, it’s puzzling that they make no appearance in this film.

Macfarlane inserts lots of shots of archival shots of New York at night and hand-held cameras moving down narrow and dark hallways, that add to the ambience of evil.

I had one experience with Weinstein. I had the effrontery to write a negative review of The Artist, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2012. Showing his pettiness, he pulled his advertising from the paper in which the review was published.

The Casting Couch has been alive and well in Hollywood since the dawn of motion pictures in the 1910s. I don’t know how Harry Cohn and others used it, but these stories aren’t of women exchanging sex for roles; rather they are blatant rapes that are described in detail. It is an emotional movie to sit through, but well worth the sit. On Hulu.