BOMBSHELLS GO TO WAR
Theron, Kidman and Robbie take the #MeToo fight to a sleazy TV boss in an Oscar bound thriller
Bombshell (15) Verdict: Not explosive, but well aimed ★★★★✩ A Hidden Life (12A) Verdict: Ambitious, but self-indulgent ★★✩✩✩
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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 ago 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. Film- makers 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 semifictionalised — 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 u.s. media?
The screenwriter is Charles Randolph, who wrote 2015’s The Big short, and Bombshell has something of that film’s zest and zip, with Theron’s character at times talking direct to camera as if fronting a documentary.
i’m also assured by those who watch Fox News that prosthetics have made both her and Kidman look eerily like the women they play, which enhances that documentary vibe.
it’s probably safe to say that Roach himself is not one of the Fox faithful. His most recent film, his first major departure from comedy, was 2015’ s
Trumbo, a sympathetic biopic of Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted in the 1950s witch-hunts of well-known suspected Communists.
Bombshell offers him another opportunity to vent against Right-wing politics, but on the whole he does so with restraint and humour — another Fox producer, jauntily played by Kate McKinnon, is far more worried about her support for Hillary Clinton leaking out than she is about her closeted lesbianism.
Besides, Kelly and Carlson were very public cheerleaders for the Right. They are not obvious figureheads for today’s #MeToo movement, which is embraced most robustly on the Left.
But then, what’s so horrifying about this extremely well-told story is not that it happened at Fox News, where Trump is lionised, but that it might have happened anywhere.
n ResisTaNCe to grotesque abuses of power is also the theme of Terrence Malick’s A
Hidden Life, based on the true story of a conscientious objector in wartime austria.
in 1939, Tyrolean farmer Franz Jagerstatter (august Diehl), a happily married father of three and devout Catholic, declines to swear an oath of allegiance to the Fuhrer.
HeCoNTiNues to refuse even when he is conscripted into the German army, even when he is imprisoned, beaten, degraded and finally sentenced to death. ‘sign and you’ll go free,’ his lawyer ( Matthias schoenaerts) tells him. ‘ But i am free,’ Franz replies.
Malick, now 76, has made only ten films since his remarkable 1973 debut, Badlands. They have come relatively thick and fast in recent years, but a new Malick film is still a cinematic event, albeit rather in the way that the first day of the sales is an event — some people might want to run in the opposite direction.
a Hidden Life — its title taken from a passage in George eliot’s Middlemarch, about goodness being defined by ‘ unhistoric acts’ — showcases much of Malick’s stylishness, but also plenty of what makes some of his films so maddening.
it exquisitely evokes an era before rural life was mechanised. We see lots of drawing water from wells and scything in the fields. But the near three-hour running time needs scything, too. ultimately, this film feels as much an exercise in self-indulgence as storytelling.