Bombshell (2019) Lionsgate/Drama RT: 108 minutes Rated R (sexual material and language throughout) Director: Jay Roach Screenplay: Charles Randolph Music: Theodore Shapiro Cinematography: Barry Aykroyd Release date: December 20, 2019 (US) Cast: Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, Margot Robbie, John Lithgow, Kate McKinnon, Connie Britton, Allison Janney, Malcolm McDowell, Liv Hewson, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Rob Delaney, Mark Duplass, Stephen Root, Robin Weigert, Amy Landecker, Mark Moses, Nazanin Boniadi, Ben Lawson, Josh Lawson, Alanna Ubach, Andy Buckley, Brooke Smith, Bree Condon, D’Arcy Carden, Kevin Dorff, Richard Kind, Marc Evan Jackson, Anne Ramsay, Jennifer Morrison, Ashley Greene, Ahna O’Reilly, Elisabeth Rohm, Alice Eve, Katie Aselton, PJ Byrne, Tony Plana, Tricia Helfer, Madeline Zima. Box Office: $31.8M (US)/$61.4M (World)
Rating: ***
The more I think about last week’s terrible Black Christmas three-make, the more I hate it. It’s the most blatant movie bait-and-switch of the year. It’s a MeToo message disguised as a slasher flick. While I agree that the issue is of paramount importance in today’s times, a movie like Black Christmas is hardly the right delivery system. It’s actually in very bad taste. It looks like I’m not the only one who thinks this. It tanked in its opening weekend bringing in a paltry $4.2 million at the box office. Many theaters have already reduced it to a single showing per day. Theater managers take note; it’s in these empty houses that you’ll find your MIA employees taking a nap.
The new drama Bombshell is the right way to address the MeToo movement. Well, it’s NOT technically about MeToo itself, but it centers on events that paved the way for it. About a year before the Harvey Weinstein story broke, another industry bigwig was taken down for making unwanted sexual advances towards women in his employ. Fox News CEO Roger Ailes ruled an empire until allegations of sexual misconduct were brought against him by Gretchen Carlson, formerly the co-host of the morning show Fox & Friends before being terminated without cause. Other high-profile women backed her story but it’s the one who remained silent that really caught the public’s attention. Megyn Kelly, the network’s biggest star at the time (summer 2016), the one who ignited a Twitter war with then-Presidential candidate Donald Trump over her questioning his treatment of women at the Republican Party debate in ’15, initially kept quiet before eventually coming forward with her own Ailes harassment horror story. That was the final blow that caused the house that Ailes built to fall. In the end, his boss, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, sent him packing (officially, he resigned).
If you followed the story three years ago, none of what I just told you constitutes a spoiler. Anybody interested in seeing Bombshell likely knows the story and its eventual outcome already. This doesn’t make it any less interesting. As presented by director Jay Roach (Trumbo), it’s a compelling tale of power, workplace gender politics and female empowerment. He takes a cue from recent fact-based films like The Big Short and Vice in having characters break the fourth wall to explain certain things to the audience in easy-to-understand terms. He makes the esoteric accessible to all. In addition, Roach makes the weighty material easier to digest by taking a light-handed approach to the story without diminishing the importance of the subject matter. He manages to strike just the right balance of sprightly and serious.
What really makes Bombshell tick is the strong performances from its three leading ladies. Charlize Theron once again proves she’s completely adept in the art of total transformation. Like she did as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster, a performance that netted her the Best Actress Oscar that year, she becomes Megyn Kelly, capturing both her physical appearance and essence to an eerily accurate degree. So complete is her transformation, you forget within minutes you’re watching an actress playing the Fox News anchor. Theron then takes it to the next level by softening Kelly’s famously icy persona to make her a more sympathetic figure. Nicole Kidman (The Hours) does tremendous work as Gretchen Carlson, projecting confidence and intelligence in equal measures. It’s a tricky performance in that she has to toggle between Carlson’s on-air sweetness and off-air ambitiousness and make it believable. She pulls it off.
Top honors also go to Margot Robbie (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) as one of the film’s few fictional characters, a new hire at Fox named Kayla Pospisil, actually an amalgamation of several of Ailes’ victims who came forward anonymously. The eager, wide-eyed rookie, who sees herself as “an influencer in the Jesus space”, is a true believer in Fox’s conservatism. She’s totally sincere in her beliefs and will do whatever it takes to get on the air. She becomes disillusioned after a humiliating meeting with Ailes in which he asks her to lift her skirt higher and higher so he can get a look. As he explains it, television is a visual medium and he needs his girls to look great on air. He has a thing for legs which explains why he always has them sitting at glass desks when they’re on the air. As great as Robbie is in QT’s film, I think her role in Bombshell will be the one that gets an Oscar nomination. John Lithgow, recently in the Pet Sematary remake, delivers a career best as the late Ailes (he died in ’17), a role that required a significant physical transformation. He perfectly embodies the predatory and paranoid sides of the Fox executive.
The one thing that keeps Bombshell from achieving greatness is the unfocused nature of the narrative. At times, it seems like Roach doesn’t know which way to go with the story. The screenplay by Big Short scribe Charles Randolph tends to meander here and there. Too many characters are introduced over the course of 108 minutes. At least Roach saw fit to include titles showing their names and titles. It helps a little. Also, I wish we had seen more of Kate McKinnon’s character, a closeted lesbian working on Bill O’Reilly’s program. She acts as mentor to Kayla explaining what constitutes a Fox News story (“Ask yourself, what would scare my grandmother or piss of my grandfather?”). She lends both comic relief and gravitas. I wish Roach did more with her story.
On the upside, we get a good look at the inner workings of Fox- i.e. the intensity of the control room, the power structure and the female anchors’ sometimes painful efforts to look their very best on the air. There’s a scene inside the wardrobe room that says it all. Bombshell is solid work. That it comes from the director of the Austin Powers trilogy is unexpected and ironic. If the British superspy brought his act to 2019, he’d be hit with a mountain of sexual harassment lawsuits. I like that Bombshell treats its subject with the respect it deserves without draping itself in a shroud of righteous indignation. It’s more outrage tempered by bemusement. It’s cool with me. The angrier the film, the more exhausting it is. I don’t always need to feel emotionally drained when I leave a movie. Bombshell gets its point across without being aggressive. Well played, Jay.
