BOMBSHELLS GO TO WAR

Our film critic gives his verdict on the Fox News thriller

THIS week’s Academy Award nominations have rightly recognised both Charlize Theron and Margot Robbie for their superb performances in Bombshell.

The powerful drama is ostensibly about the downfall of Roger Ailes, the US TV titan who turned Fox News into one of the mightiest bulwarks of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.

I say ostensibly, because director Jay Roach uses the Ailes story to shine an unforgiving light on all predatory sexual behaviour, not just on the transgressions portrayed here. All the same, this picture, set during the 2016 US presidential campaign, will help to ensure that Ailes (a tremendous John Lithgow) won’t chiefly be remembered for his many professional accomplishments, any more than Harvey Weinstein will be. I wonder when Hollywood will chronicle Weinstein’s alleged crimes on screen?

For now, Ailes is an easier target, having died in May 2017 — less than a year after Murdoch (played here by Malcolm McDowell) forced him to resign.

Since then, and now further propelled by this feature film, his name has become synonymous with sexual harassment — and worse.

Ailes habitually used his stature to manoeuvre female journalists at Fox into granting him sexual favours in return for career advancement.

In the movie industry that squalid equation has always been known as the casting couch.

Here, it might be renamed the broadcasting couch.

Bombshell’s most most disturbing scene sees a go-getting young producer called Kayla (Robbie), desperate for a presenting gig, wangle a private audience with the boss. He invites her to stand and twirl, so he can assess her physical attributes. After all, he tells her, ‘television is a visual medium’. There’s no arguing with that, and it might even be interpreted as benign encouragement, yet for Ailes it is merely the opening salvo in his grooming strategy.

He asks Kayla to hoist her dress higher, and higher, and higher still. Horrified, embarrassed, humiliated, she obliges. Filmmakers less clever than Roach (who, in what must seem like another career altogether, directed the Austin Powers and Meet The Parents movies), might have been tempted to show more graphic sexual abuse. But it’s been a while since I’ve sat through a scene so charged, in its sleazy, sinister way, with dramatic tension.

Unlike the other central characters, Kayla is semi-fictionalised — a composite. She is too junior to topple Ailes, but if you picture his reputation as a pile of Jenga blocks, the first brick is removed by Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman, also brilliant), who dares to sue him after being fired from her slot on a talkshow.

The film then becomes a kind of thriller, as the network’s star female anchor, Megyn Kelly (Theron), wrestles with her conscience, which is itself at odds with her ambition.

She has already rather let presidential hopeful Donald Trump off the hook when quizzing him on his attitude towards women in a televised interview.

But will she stop short of accusing Ailes — who, early in her career subjected her to his gruesome advances?

Or will she whip away the all-important brick, terminally destabilising one of the most influential men in US media?

The screenwriter is Charles Randolph, who wrote 2015’s The Big Short, and Bombshell has something