Bombshell (Apple/Amazon) feels very much like Vice for the #MeToo movement, taking a true and important story – the downfall of Roger Ailes as his decades of sexual harassment and assaults came to light – and trivializing it through an excessively slick, shallow script that is only salvaged by strong lead performances from Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman. I was entertained, as I was by Vice, but I was not informed, and I don’t think the movie did enough to explain how the situation was allowed to persist.
The script has a glib approach where Megyn Kelly (Theron) and Gretchen Carlson (Kidman) often break the fourth wall to tell the viewers background information relevant to the story, such as how Fox News operates behind the scenes or what Ailes’ history was prior to founding Fox News and building it into the country’s biggest cable news network. Bombshell then takes us through three roughly simultaneous storylines, one around each of the three main women in the film: Kelly’s meteoric rise at the network and Donald Trump’s subsequent attacks on her after she challenged him on his history of mistreatment of women; Carlson’s lawsuit against Ailes for sexual harassment, claiming she was demoted from her show for illegal cause; and the fictional Kayla (Margot Robbie), a wide-eyed ingenue who calls herself an “evangelical millennial” and ends up another Ailes victim. The three stories eventually intersect as Kelly and Carlson independently look for other women to speak up against Ailes. (Ailes and Fox settled with Carlson, Fox paid off Ailes’ contract by way of firing him, and Ailes was dead within a year.)
Bombshell looks incredible. Theron is a ridiculous likeness for Kelly between the hairstyling and makeup, for which the movie won its lone Academy Award, and her mimicry of Kelly’s voice and delivery. Kidman’s not quite as dead a ringer for Carlson, but is pretty close. I thought John Lithgow did his best with Ailes, making him into a blustering, lecherous tyrant, although the physical resemblance isn’t there. Nearly every on-air personality at Fox who gets a moment in this film is played by someone who looks just like them, however, which you could view as incredible dedication to verisimilitude, or a big fat missing of the point, that it is story that matters, not imitation.
Theron and Robbie were both nominated for awards, Theron for Best Actress and Robbie for Supporting, but I don’t think either deserved the win and thought Robbie was better in a smaller role Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Kayla is written so thinly and Robbie has no room to do anything except show some gross emotions, mostly because she’s a prop for the plot, not an actual person or a fully-developed character – she’s there to give Ailes someone to harass while we watch.
And that’s biggest problem with Bombshell: it’s so concerned with making things look right that it doesn’t bother telling the story behind the story. How Ailes got away with this for nearly twenty years – and probably longer, although the story doesn’t touch anything he did prior to Fox News – is never addressed, nor does the story touch on the toxic corporate culture within Fox News, or why the Murdochs didn’t care until they did care, or, perhaps most interesting of all, why so many women stayed quiet. If anything, the movie blames the victim a bit when Kayla confronts Megyn to ask why she waited ten years to talk about Ailes harassing her. It’s a jarring, wrong note for a movie that seems so eager to tell you it’s right. This story, and these women, deserved a lot better.