Can you make a movie about Fox News and its inner workings without making it particularly political? The new movie Bombshell seems to try as it focuses most of its energy onto various women working there and the toxic workplace they all had to deal with, most notably coming from the network’s CEO Roger Ailes (as played by a fat-suited John Lithgow in the movie). Does something like that really work?
Truth be told, the answer may be “a little but not as much as the makers wanted it to”. Bombshell tries to thread the needle by keeping the politics in the background. But given how this movie operates, with Ailes essentially asking for a quid pro quo from the various female Fox employees he harasses, and how he’s portrayed as a paranoid man inclined to believe in conspiracy theories, shows Rudy Guiliani acting as Ailes’s lawyer trying to sweet talk his way into meetings he had no business in, and that the movie openly compares him to Donald Trump on multiple occasions, it’s hard to see how anyone could see this as an apolitical movie.
As far as that goes, we don’t see characters getting on soap boxes to espouse their beliefs aside from maybe a short scene here or there. Arguably, the most politically-inclined character in the movie is a closeted lesbian and Democrat played by Kate McKinnon, a fictional producer on Bill O’Reilly’s show who takes equally fictional rightwing Evangelical Christian Kayla (Margot Robbie) under her wing early on to help the idealist from the Midwest survive in the hostile work environment. And even then, all McKinnon’s Jess says is she only works at Fox because it was the only place she could get a job and now that it’s on her resume no one else will hire her, and she really wants Hilary Clinton to be president. Likewise, we hear Nicole Kidman’s Gretchen Carlson come out for an assault weapons ban, and we get a recreation of Megyn Kelly’s (Charlize Thereon) famous insistence that both Jesus and Santa were white men.
No, much of what we get on the political end comes from more of the internal belief in what Fox News represents for its viewers and more True Believer employees. Early on, we see Robbie’s Kayla earnestly explaining how Megyn and Gretchen are now Establishment with a capital E and how “Fair and Balanced” is a true statement for a news network known to be very right-of-center and not even trying to hide it as far as the loyal viewers like her family are concerned. Much of the movie deals with the environment that Ailes fostered. He was the visionary, so to speak, who realizes transparent desks for leggy women got viewers’ attention. That he extended such practices to the “audition” stage makes a lot of sense, and the movie shows any of the women deviating from the Fox hive mind was harassed and punished for such deviation. And it wasn’t just men keeping the handful that spoke out in line as the movie depicts the likes of Jeanine Pirro and to a lesser extent Kimberly Guilfoyle of being very adamantly pro-Roger. The latter hands out pro-Roger T-shirts she expected people to wear around the office and the former pressures Kelly into making a public statement in favor of Roger Ailes when Kelly was staying silent until she’s made up her mind.
But the movie only works but so much. Director Jay Roach seems to be trying to imitate the dramatic style of Adam McKay, but this is at best only a superficial copying of the sorts of work McKay has done with The Big Short and Vice. The movie opens as if Theron’s Kelly was reporting the story for a news program, switching a bit between her, Kidman’s Carlson, and even Robbie’s Kayla in a similar manner, but that framing device is often abandoned for long stretches. Likewise, it is a bit distracting hearing Theron and to a lesser extent Kidman try to do what sounds like impersonations of their characters. Kidman’s mostly speaking in a higher voice, but for Theron that means adapting what sounds like a Midwestern accent, but it mostly makes her sound stilted as she talks.
As for Lithgow’s Ailes, we get multiple scenes where characters talk about him as if he were a likable man who does good deeds. His wife (Connie Britton) dismisses much of what he does as “salty talk”. We’re told he stood by employees with problems, paying for medical expenses, and did offer good career advice to numerous people along the way of both genders. The only problem there is we only hear about these things. We never really see them. We only see Ailes acting either paranoid or gross, and that’s when he’s not connecting himself so tightly to Fox that he assumes an attack on him as an attack on the Network itself, even as he has to be reminded he doesn’t actually own the network.
Likewise, the movie has moments where it shows clips of archival photos of Ailes and various Fox personalities. But then there would be scenes of those same personalities played by actors who are clearly different people. True, the movie opens with an explanation that aside from archival footage, most of what follows is dramatic recreations featuring actors, but if they were going to go out of their way to seemingly insert Theron and Kidman into scenes with various real Fox personalities, why not just go for broke and not include any shots of these real people?
Now, all this may make the movie out to sound bad. It wasn’t. It just wasn’t the earth-shattering expose that I think it was going for. It’s a perfectly cromulent movie, and that’s about all it is.
Grade: C+
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