BOMBSHELL (2019/20)
Directed by Jay Roach
Lionsgate, 109 minutes, R (language, adult situations)
★★★★
Conservatives spin it nine ways to Sunday, but Fox News in America’s Pravda. At best it is schtick pretending to be investigative journalism. Neo-fascists such as Pat Buchanan, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O’Reilly have gotten away with outrageous antics by banking on the assumption that the majority of its viewers will not differentiate between objectivity and accusation. It’s also a place where women are hired for shapely legs, not their knowledge of current affairs.
Sexism is the one thing that has pumped the brakes at Fox. Bombshell uses quasi-documentary storytelling to recount how it felled Fox CEO/chairman Roger Ailes (John Lithgow) and O’Reilly in 2016. The movie focuses on two of the Miss Americas hired by Fox: Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron) and Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman). Bombshell has a few serious craters, but it lifts the veil on a media machine fueled by manufactured outrage, piggish males, and fear.
The Fox house of cards began to wobble after Carlson was fired in 2013, though the Bombshell narrative centers more on Kelly. This is partly because Carlson’s contract stipulated that she could not sue the network, so she instead had to bring suit against Ailes for sexual harassment. For a time, she was a lone crusader; others lacked the courage to admit that had been fondled, ogled, degraded, or pressured into sexual encounters with Ailes. Most feared dismissal and knew that, with rare exceptions, Fox News was a dead-end job that destroyed one’s journalistic credibility.
Everyone, though, has limits. Kelly found herself branded disloyal when she dared push candidate Donald Trump on numerous allegations of sexual impropriety. In 2016, few understood the depth of Trump’s perfidy or thuggish tactics. You might recall that Trump counterpunched with remarks implying that Kelly was leaking blood from her vagina and thus suffering from menstrual hysteria. One wonders what would have happened had Trump the intelligence to put down the gloves when he was ahead, or if Ailes had stopped behaving like a 75-year-old horny teenager. Eventually, Kelly also joined the lawsuit, though she knew it meant her Fox career was over. But not even owner Rupert Murdoch (Malcolm McDowell)—nobody’s idea of a shrinking violet—could ignore the allegations and, in 2016, he canned Ailes and O’Reilly.
I wish the makers of Bombshell had stuck to the ugly facts and kept their focus. The film’s documentary style involved re-creating the newsroom. It is overstuffed with characters—nearly 50 in total—which means that other nasty creatures such as Susan Estrich, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Hannity, Abby Huntsman, O’Reilly, Geraldo Rivera, Bill Shine, Chris Wallace, and Murdoch’s sons have roles that are little more than creepy cameos. A more curious decision was to introduce two fictional main characters: Kayla Pospisil (Margot Robbie) and Jess Carr (Kate McKinnon). Pospisil is an ambitious evangelical who wants to advance the “Jesus agenda” for Fox, and Carr is an O’Reilly Factor staffer who is both a closeted liberal supporter of Hillary Clinton and a closeted lesbian who beds the not-exactly-by-the-Bible Pospisil (who is also an Ailes victim). Allegedly, both women are Fox News composites who don’t wish to come public. If so, why put them in the movie in the first place?
Rudy Giuliani (Richard Kind) also delivers an on-screen rant. He gets no sympathy from me but, in truth, he played no part in the Ailes/O’Reilly debacle. Unless you ascribe to the view–and I do not–that it’s okay to lie to takedown liars, it is inexcusable to fictionalize just to give Robbie a juicy part or take a gratuitous swipe at Giuliani. It is also a disservice to those 23 women brave enough to subject themselves to the further indignation of public scrutiny.
Theron is very good as Kelly, whom she serves up as equal parts icy, savvy, and conflicted. Despite star power such as Theron, Kidman, and Robbie, though, John Lithgow steals the movie. He is positively chilling in depicting Ailes as an amoral and chilling predator who believed himself too powerful to challenge. I also admired the decision not to lionize anyone at Fox. We come away disgusted by Ailes and O’Reilly, but Bombshell is also a portrait of those who valued money, celebrity, and power over truth, morality, or decency– predators and victims alike. Sexual harassment is always wrong, but victimhood alone does not someone honorable.
It is, though, hard to get past two hard-to-swallow ironies. Fox paid its harassment victims $50 million in settlements, but shelled out $65 million to buyout Ailes and O’Reilly. There is also the matter of how Bombshell was received by the film establishment. The only awards it consistently won were for hair styling.
Rob Weir
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