There’s a moral conundrum that hangs over Jay Roach’s Bombshell that the movie can never quite shake off. As bad as what happens to the women at the centre of the story is and as much as they deserve to take down the men responsible, the wider context that is the elephant in the room the movie refuses to address is the fact that before the 2016 exposé of Roger Ailes’ sex crimes, these women actively participated in furthering the culture of ignorance and victim-blaming that is part of the modus operandi of Fox News, North America’s most successful propaganda machine. The knowledge of the ramifications of their words and actions outside of the scandal significantly stifles your investment in them and is at the heart of why the movie feels incredibly inauthentic.
The story behind Bombshell is juicy enough for the feature film treatment, and it gives Hollywood directors and writers a large assortment of over-the-top personalities to work with. It also has scale working for it in how influential a figure Ailes was and how powerful an entity like Fox News is. But I can’t help thinking the story of the fall of a serial sexual abuser would be better served in an environment that doesn’t ask its audience to sympathize with the very people who would quickly ignore such injustices otherwise. The movie takes place largely during the summer of 2016 as Fox News was covering the Trump presidential campaign –in which they famously made excuses for his history of sexual harassment.
Of course to be fair, the movie addresses that in a sideways way through centering a large chunk of its plot on one of the few women at Fox to publicly take issue with Trump’s misogyny: Megyn Kelly, here played by Charlize Theron. And the movie spends a deal of its first third on the fallout of her grilling questions from the primary debate and subsequent interviews, including the invasion of her familys’ privacy and death threats from Trumps’ cultish supporters, to better endear her to audiences. Further, the film emphasizes the decency of the people around her including her husband (Mark Duplass), her producer (Rob Delaney), and a pair of interns played by Liv Hewson and Brigette Lundy-Paine. But it stops short of fully lending her our sympathy by maintaining some truth of her character, such as playing a clip where she argues for the whiteness of Santa Claus and her repeated insistence she’s not a feminist. And the film is constantly struggling with this dichotomy. Roach clearly comes from a place of little fondness towards Fox News, satirizing it pretty vehemently in some scenes, yet strives to gauge empathy for a couple of the cogs freely pushing its damaging perversion of journalism, overlooking certain colours of their personalities and political opinions, yet holding true just enough so that the audience is kept aware of their deep conservatism. The result is a somewhat palatable version of the story, focused on politically harmless characters you can understand if not relate to, but kept at a distance, embroiled in this noble crusade while ignoring larger contexts and always with a calculated dishonesty pervading the narrative being told.
That narrative is the very straightforward exposure of Ailes’ decades’ worth of sexual harassment and abuse, and how it astonishingly led to his ousting from the one media empire that would have tolerated such gross misdemeanours. John Lithgow basks in the sliminess and paranoia of his character to a disturbingly real degree, an impression made all the more potent by the repulsive prosthetics he’s made to wear. He’s something genuinely monstrous, particularly in a scene with Margot Robbie’s composite young producer character, the film doing everything it can to make him as vile and distasteful as possible. In contrast, the victimized women at the forefront of the scandal are shown as strong, determined, and exceptionally clever. Alongside Theron, though with much less screentime is Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson (complete with an unconvincing chin prosthetic), who first breaks silence and files the initial suit, spending much of the movie waiting for fellow Fox employees to come to her defence.
With Robbie’s Kayla Pospisil, these three main women are meant to represent different stages of dealing with sexual abuse: Kelly having suffered it in the distant past and having mostly moved on but remains wounded by it, Carlson whose episode is from the more recent past and is determined to seek justice for it, and Pospisil who is enduring it currently. Through each of them, women who’ve dealt with sexual abuse or toxic male behaviour have an avatar to latch onto and it’s the structural and thematic choice that works the strongest in this movie, having real widespread resonance. And it allows for the movie to occasionally earn your investment and the vicarious satisfaction of bringing down Ailes as a stand-in for all powerful men with similar histories.
It’s not enough though to shake the disingenuousness of the film, and its tendency to hide or turn a blind eye to a lot of other heinous stuff happening at Fox, as well as the fact its protagonists believe much of the toxic, hateful, and bewilderingly ignorant content that remains the networks’ brand. Honing in on Ailes means ignoring Hannity; it means only foreshadowing O’Reilly, and it means just generally sidestepping the environment of rampant sexism that exists in that skyscraper on sixth avenue in Manhattan. The performances are really good, particularly from Theron, but they’re unfortunately misplaced in a movie that can’t avoid mixed messaging in a culture that knows that the values of this film and those of the real people at its heart are inextricably disparate.
Movies with this subject matter should be made, especially now that there’s so little tolerance for what Ailes and co. got away with for so many years. And I’m certain Bombshell isn’t the last movie of its kind (it seems inevitable there will be a Weinstein one eventually). But this just wasn’t the right one. Because no matter how hard you try, no movie about fighting sexual harassment can honestly champion figures of Fox News.
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