A BOMBSHELL of a Movie

(Inset: Megyn Kelly), Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, (Inset: Gretchen Carlson

From a Feminist Viewpoint:

 

You see them in their saucy 5-inch heels and revealing tight skirts, the female icons of sex and sophistication, striding through the offices of big money-making corporations for industries like publishing, fashion, real estate, financial planning, broadcasting, and other high profile, high powered international businesses. Bombshell is a movie about such women, in the field of television broadcasting. 

It’s not an accident that the setting for the film is the offices of Fox News. I confess to have little knowledge of Fox News and just a faint awareness of the performers who inhabit the newsroom. It is not the kind of television that appeals to me because of its politics, but it is in the peripheral vision of any American with a television set. It is a propaganda outlet, spewing the venom that the Republican party has been generating for decades, and doing it successfully, largely by exploiting the sex appeal of its female stars.  Bombshell lets us get to know those females and observe them in their daily lives, which are pretty extraordinary, like it or not. 

The dazzling Chalize Theron plays the dazzling Megyn Kelly, who topped the Fox News lineup of beautiful, steely women pundits for more than a decade. Kelly herself could have come from Central Casting as a hard-headed, hard-hitting and opinionated bitch-on-wheels type in any movie, and Theron’s transformation is pretty dazzling too. She looks like her, and has mastered the rapid-fire delivery of lines employed by purveyors of broadcast news in the 21st century. The movie opens with a cozy walk around the newsroom with Kelly (Theron) as a sleek, informative guide, and she wins us over from that intro, which captures the newsroom vibe and sets the tone for an exciting ride. In the mix comes Nicole Kidmann as Gretchen Carlson, the former Miss America already hitting her peak at the network and beginning a shaky ride downward. 

Margot Robbie, a playing a pretty little thing, (and fictional character) has just gotten her dream job starting at the network, and reveals that she and her parents adore Fox News and that she is desperate to make it big. She shares a cubicle with Kate McKinnon playing an outlier, keeping as low a profile as she can at the network because she is a lesbian, not a beauty queen--and may actually be a Democrat. She takes a shine to the Robbie character and they have a touching bedroom scene that reveals the heart of the film.

John Lithgow, as Roger Ailes, founder and CEO of Fox, is appropriately repulsive, knowledgeable, (“It’s a visual medium,” he says to neophyte beauties as he undresses them with his eyes in initial interviews, and asks them to stand up and “twirl” for him). Lithgow comes over as unscrupulous as the villain in any piece must be. The formidable Lithgow plays it to the hilt.

It’s fun to watch actors portraying real-life people, as Richard Kind does a credible Rudy Guiliani, Allison Janney give us Susan Estrich, and the newsroom swarms with semi-familiar faces as the story moves forward. Holland Taylor, uncredited for some reason, does a convincing turn as Ailes’ keeper of secrets. There is one sympathetic male character, also fictional (a composite of several real men, we are told) played by the very interesting Rob Delaney. There is a moment or two of poignant revelation, as both he and McKinnon say, at different times in the picture, that if Fox News drops them or is itself brought down, there is nowhere else for them to go. “Nobody will hire us--because we worked for Fox News.” 

Intrigue abounds as we see what’s under the rock once it’s moved. I found myself moved at the point in the story when the women at the network are speaking out about Ailes and his treatment of them. Robbie’s character calls her one friend, Jess (McKinnon) in tears because she’s talking with a lawyer about Ailes’ demands. This is a very convincing and heart-rending scene, superbly acted, yet I found myself thinking, “Why do I sympathize with this character? I don’t like women like this…” and then I realized that it was really what the movie was about.  

Its basic axe to grind is not the reprehensible behavior of Roger Ailes. It is about what happens to beauty queens when they achieve their goals. Practically all the female characters have spent their lives grooming themselves for the ultimate position they desire. Intelligent, pretty, ambitious, they have molded themselves into the kind of women who succeed, yet, at the pinnacle, they are shown the reality that the power they may have desired is going to be doled out in small portions by old white men who have their own prurient interests in mind. That dynamic is never on the screen, but it is clear who is participating, who is looking the other way, and why. 

The film was ably written by Charles Randolph and directed by Jay Roach, both males clearly with a hypersensitivity to the plight of women. It is snappily paced, superbly performed, and slick as a whistle. Its surface is glossy, yet for all its glitz it tells a tale of the ultimate betrayal of women in the workplace.