Fast-paced Bombshell goes out with a bang
Director Roach’s fast-paced Bombshell tells a dark and tragic tale with humour
Let’s hear it for John Lithgow. Granted, he’s only a supporting character in the new movie Bombshell, about the downfall of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. But since he’s playing Ailes, he has the thankless task of portraying an odious, hateful individual and somehow making him — well, never sympathetic, but scarily plausible.
What could have been a cardboard villain feels frighteningly genuine, especially in the scenes where he proclaims “Television is a visual medium” before telling some young journalist to hike up her skirt and let him see her legs. You’ll shiver.
Bombshell was written by Charles Randolph (The Big Short) and directed by Jay Roach (Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Trumbo) and it has a similar feel to previous work from both filmmakers. That is, while the story it tells is real and quite dark, even tragic, the treatment is fast-paced and often funny.
For instance, we get Kate Mckinnon of Saturday Night Live fame as a closeted lesbian/democrat — not sure which trait she tries harder to conceal from her conservative Fox News bosses. She explains to newbie journalist Kayla (Margot Robbie) that Fox’s aim is to frighten and titillate in roughly equal measure.
Kayla is both a composite character and the audience’s way into this sticky tale, but the story turns on the very real experiences of Fox News’ Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson, played by Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman, respectively. In 2016, Carlson sued Ailes for sexual harassment, claiming she’d been fired for refusing his advances. Kelly added her voice to the growing chorus of women who claimed they’d been similarly harassed.
Ailes died less than a year later, but not before being ousted from the network he’d helped create, and becoming an early poster boy (if that’s the right word) for the burgeoning #Metoo movement.
Beyond the zippy screenplay — brisk but never dizzying, dense but understandable — the great achievement of the film is how it creates the atmosphere of a workplace beset by harassment and scandal, not unlike that of a prison, or a prison camp. Inmates — sorry, employees — seek out confidantes with trepidation, and everyone is alert to who’s talking to whom.
Institutional trust is absent: “A hotline in this building is like a suggestion box in occupied Paris,” Kelly says at one point. Later, when she goes to talk to a former colleague (Jennifer Morrison), she is warned that Ailes has private detectives to follow his enemies and if necessary make up stories about them: “It’s called the Black Room.”
Robbie and Kidman are fantastic as two different generations of women beset by the same problems but at very different points in their career trajectories. But it’s Theron who truly disappears into her role from the get-go: The film opens with her finding herself on the wrong end of a Donald Trump Twitter bombing campaign.
The film is a crafty construction, using clips of real individuals, throwing voice-over and interior monologue into the mix, and framing it all with skittish camerawork. It sometimes reaches a little far: Fellow harasser Bill O’reilly is mentioned in a post-credit tagline but barely appears in the film.
But on the Ailes front it’s unassailable. Cornered and caged, at one point he screams: “These women are trying to f--- me!” Nope; quite the opposite.