BOMBSHELL ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️By Armen Pandola
In Graham Greene's The Third Man, directed by Carol Reed, an American writer of westerns with the improbable name Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) travels to post-WWII Vienna to work with his childhood friend, Harry Lime (Orson Welles). When he arrives, he discovers that Lime is dead and the police think Lime committed heinous crimes. Martins tells a book club audience that he is writing a new book based on his late friend's adventures. A shadowy business associate of the late Lime tells him that he is doing something very dangerous - mixing fact with fiction. He threatens Martins by advising him to stick to fiction, pure fiction.
In Bombshell, screenwriter Charles Randolph (The Big Short) dangeruously combines the story of two actual victims of sexual harassment by Fox News creator and CEO Roger Ailes (John Lithgow) with fictional characters who are victims of Ailes' scabrous sexual appetite. Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) is a star at Fox but her unwillingness to continue to succumb to Ailes' advances leaves her without a friend at Fox and she is demoted to an afternoon show and then to the door. Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron) is the rising star at Fox who has been similarly 'Ailesed' and makes the mistake of asking Ailes' other creation, Donald Trump, some embarrassing questions about his demeaning of women. The third member of this trio of graces is Kayla Popisil (Margot Robbie), a fictional character who, the author claims, is a composite of many women at Fox who were forced to kneel at the altar of Ailes.
For those who have not drunk the Kool Aid, sympathizing with Carlson and Kelly is a tough sell. Sure, no matter what your politics, you have a right to be free of licentious bosses, but - and this is a big BUT - It is difficult to work up a lot of indignation for women who made their careers spouting right-wing/religious prattle while kow-towing to the sexual fantasies of men who ran Fox.
Bombshell director Jay Roach (Meet the Fockers, Austin Powers) tries to keep things light and fast. The only scene of actual sexual harassment that is shown is Ailes forcing Popisil to lift her already short skirt up to reveal her panty. But this scene occurs only after Popisil has followed Ailes' pimp/secretary into the elevator with the intention of getting noticed and sent into the liars' den, Ailes' office. Of course, she didn't know what was going to be expected of her, but she was already in an organization that exploited its women and made no secret of the fact that it wished the feminist movement ill. So, in a movie about work-place sexual harassment, the most powerful scene in the movie is a phone call that Popisil has with her cubicle partner, Jess Carr (Kate Mckinnon) in which she reveals that she has succumbed to Ailes' advances and had sex with him. I cannot imagine that this would have been the case if a woman was hired to direct or write the script. Why are we still allowing Hollywood men to tell these stories?
Bombshell wants to tell this powerful story of sex and TV, but without too much politics. It follows on the heels of Showtimes' The Loudest Voice with a bravura performance by Russell Crowe as Ailes. While TLV concentrated on Carlson (Naomi Watts), Bombshell focuses on Kelly and fictional Popisil. Kelly's husband (Mark Duplass) is in a few scenes in which he tries to protect his wife from right-wing bullies, but, ultimately, he is disappointed in how his wife deals with the blowback from her confrontation with Trump - but that is the point! Kelly got where she was at Fox because she knew how to play that game.
Carlson is fired at the beginning of the movie and her quest to get other harassed Fox female employees to come forward is the driving force of the movie. The performances are pitch-perfect and, as opposed to The Irishman, the accents and make-up match the acting. As they use to say in movie publicity ads, Charlize Theron IS Megyn Kelly!
Bombshell ends with Ailes getting the boot from the boss, Rupert Murdoch (Malcolm Mcdowell), Carlson gets her humongous settlement, Kelly does the right thing and the fictional Popisil rides off into the fictional horizon. A blurb tells us that Fox paid $50 million to various women to settle harassment claims, but $65 million to Ailes as a parting kiss.
I liked Bombshell, but it could have been better. Ailes did not exist in a vacuum - it takes an entire company to make a serial sexual predator. The entire Fox phenomenon and culture was to blame. There was and is nothing that Fox will not do to feed and grow its audience of right-wing, conspiracy-loving, women-hating, war-mongering red-state viewers. Sure, a lot of very good people watch Fox, but these very good people have to ignore a whole lot of nasty behavior by Fox men, just as the female Trumpsters have to ignore almost every tweet, speech and diatribe by the Predator-in-Chief. That is the real story - not what happened, but how and why it happened. We're still waiting for that movie.