Fox News misogyny ignites Bombshell
BOMBSHELL
Starring Charlize Theron. Rated 14A
➧ “FAR-RIGHT
women surprised to find that far-right men treat them badly.” If Bombshell, with its doublebarrelled title, was a single news story, that could be the headline. But this timely and cleverly engaging film comprises many stories, some so new they haven’t even happened yet. Still, it smartly focuses on verifiable horrors that happened recently enough to colour everything we’re seeing now.
Even more cogently, it takes place inside Fox News—licensed as an entertainment channel but smirkily pretending to deliver “fair and balanced” information—where a number of women had the genuine courage to speak out in an environment designed to confine them to the narrowest space possible. Obviously, there has since been no shortage of bad behaviour at more liberal outlets. But at Fox we encounter an army of bottle blonds in tight skirts, and gender conformity in a purely Caucasian climate of reactionary fear is the main subject of a tale that initially centres on two hard-working flag-wavers for the cause.
Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) gets the #MeToo ball rolling by filing a sexual harassment suit against Fox mastermind Roger Ailes (a Churchill-padded John Lithgow) in 2015, when Bombshell begins. Played here by Charlize Theron, who miraculously disappears into the role with light prosthetics and exactly the right depth-charge voice, Megyn Kelly caused even more of a stir by challenging prenomination Donald Trump on his rampant misogyny, and was rewarded by the ascendant candidate with accusations of, as she puts it, “anger menstruation”.
This leads to death threats, and no small amount of self-doubt for a woman who discovered that, in the rightosphere, loyalty is a one-way street and even the slightest challenge is viewed as a capital crime. Kelly’s standing is uncertain for a while, as Ailes’s boss, Rupert Murdoch (Malcolm McDowell), is still testing the wind as to Trump’s chances to lead the whitey righties. In the midst of all this, the abuse machine clicks on, with randy Roger’s secretary (Holland Taylor) actively procuring “fresh talent” for him and his supercilious wife (Connie Britton).
And thus the movie—written by Charles Randolph, who dissected the 2008 financial crisis in The Big
Short—brings us the fictional Kayla Pospisil (Margot Robbie), a brighteyed evangelical Midwesterner who takes us through the semi-invalid boss’s sultanic predilections, which include having the newbies lift their skirts and “twirl”.
The fact that these three women, and others, have such a hard time joining forces, or even connecting the dots, is the most biting subtext for director Jay Roach, equally adept at broad comedy, as in the Austin Powers flicks, and political satire, like HBO’s prescient Game Change. There’s a lot of fourth-wall breaking here, some elements are too bluntly drawn, and Kidman somehow gets lost in the breezy shuffle. Kayla’s emotional growth feels too rushed at times, but she does get a lot of good lines. When she lets her guard down and sleeps with a closeted coworker played by SNL’s Kate McKin- non, Kayla notices a Hillary Clinton poster on her new friend’s wall, and says, without irony, “I could never take you home to meet my parents!” by Ken Eisner
AND THE BIRDS RAINED DOWN
Starring Gilbert Sicotte. Rated PG
➧ LOUISE ARCHAMBAULT’S
gently paced and unexpectedly deep new film has a kind of tenderness you don’t often experience in the movies.
That sensitivity isn’t just apparent in the way the French-Canadian director shoots the conifer forests and the rippling lake where her story’s central trio of grey-bearded hermits like to bathe, bare-assed. It’s the way she eases into their unhurried rhythms and gives the characters the quiet time to breathe and connect.
It’s slow going, but the payoff resonates all the more for the patience Archambault puts into this poetic and melancholy little chamber piece, one that’s based on the equally smallscaled novel by Jocelyne Saucier. In its nuanced way, the film manages to encompass ideas of time, aging, love, loneliness, euthanasia, and our eco peril, often movingly so.
Each of the three men has come to live in these shacks in the bush for his own reasons: Charlie (Gilbert Sicotte) fled a cancer diagnosis, bar singer Tom (Rémy Girard) may be trying to distance himself from booze, and Ted (Kenneth Welsh) retreated after losing his family to the Great Fires that ravaged the region unspecified decades ago. They also happen to farm a little weed on the side.
These men don’t like outsiders. But their bucolic world gets disrupted when visitors arrive, brought by Steve (Éric Robidoux), a young single guy who owns a near-empty hunting lodge hotel nearby and delivers supplies. He brings in his elderly aunt Gertrude (Andrée Lachapelle), who’s refusing to return to her longtime psychiatric facility, and Raf (Ève Landry), a young female photographer looking to take portraits of Great Fire survivors (and thus, Ted).
Some of the scenario strains believability, not least the supplies and setup the gents enjoy in the woods. But the most touching moments belong to Charlie and Gertrude, who gradually form a bond, him gently showing her how to live life outside the walls of an institution and the pair slowly revealing their backstories at bedtime by a fireplace. Their pairing is nicely offset by the younger Raf and Steve, two other misfits who find a comfortable, if not sexual, bond over pot and horror movies.
Montreal indie-folk band Will Driving West adds atmosphere to the moody visuals. But what stands out most is the fully fleshed old folks here—figuratively as well as literally. With few words, Sicotte and Lachapelle show stirrings rarely portrayed in the elderly, and not just the erotic kind. The octagenarians’ subtle lessons about living in the moment should translate easily to anyone decades younger. by Janet Smith
THE WHALE AND THE RAVEN
A documentary by Mirjam Leuze. Rating unavailable
➧ ALMOST EXACTLY 40
years ago, newly elected President Ronald Reagan unceremoniously removed the solar panels Jimmy Carter had placed on the roof of the White House, part of an effort to redirect his country’s effort towards alternative energy sources. The mind boggles as to where we could be now, after so many decades of dedicated research. But hey, those big petro companies like to make money the way they’ve always made money, and they know where their public subsidies are coming from.
Exxon et cetera likewise understand that the vast cost of disaster mitigation—along with all that free land and water—will be borne by the public. But can you really put a price tag on entire eco-systems once they are gone? That’s one of the main questions asked by anxious observers in The Whale and
the Raven, written, directed, and shot by Mirjam Leuze, born in what used to be West Germany.
As you might surmise, this new National Film Board effort, made in conjunction with German TV, makes a special effort to view the blue-green Pacific Northwest through Indigenous eyes—that is, the people who have been observing the delicate dance of feathers, fins, and firs for millennia. The transit patterns of humpback whales, orcas, and other ocean-going mammals are particularly useful to watch in the still waters of the Kitimat area of B.C., which the filmmaker first visited as a teenager—on a fluke, as it were—also about four decades ago.
Family friend Hermann Meuter and his then-partner Janie Wray later washed up in that area, specifically on Whale Point, at the bottom of Gil Island, in traditional territory of the Gitga’at First Nation. Their whale research centre was an important point of reference for the battle against oil tankers, as it is now in a renewed bid to let LNG vessels through the area, assuredly disrupting the quiet realm of these great beasts, who use sonar to stay connected.
Adopted into the Blackfish and Raven clans for their tireless efforts, Meuter and Wray are two of the principal subjects here, among mostly First Nations residents. Parallels between human clans and the cetaceous kind are obvious, without being hammered home. Some prosaically shot scenes linger just a little past their cinematic usefulness, but you can’t fault Leuze and friends for wanting to spend extra time in a place where people are humble enough to take their cues from nature. And the overhead shots of this gorgeous, if precarious, landscape are worth the price of your passage. by Ken Eisner
THE INVISIBLE LIFE OF EURÍDICE GUSMÃO
Starring Carol Duarte. In Portuguese and Greek, with English subtitles. Rated 18A
➧ JUST AS
the average Brazilian no longer notices crumbling favelas butting up against gated villas, misogyny is so ingrained in Latin America’s largest nation that the public has become inured to such inconveniences as 15 women being murdered every day, or somebody’s female partner being beaten every few seconds. Having a president who laughingly extolls rape and torture doesn’t help (in any country).
This background is a crucial impetus for making films like The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão, which attempt to illuminate the more regressive aspects of everyday life in Brazil, noting their roots in colonialism and slavery. Domestic violence is a passing part of this family saga, which takes place over something like five decades, but the subject, per the title, is really the medium-firm bigotry of low see next page