Bombshell (2019)
The saying “money is the root of all evil” isn’t fair to money. Money doesn’t corrupt any more than chairs or milk or tailored suits.
What corrupts is the belief that you’re untouchable and therefore have the freedom to do whatever you want; money just gives you the path to such immunity.
The same goes for positions of power.
Despite taking place almost entirely inside the Fox News building in NYC, “Bombshell” (2019) wasn’t about politics, it was about sexual harassment.
Roger Ailes was the CEO of Fox News from 1996 until 2016 when he was fired by Rupert Murdoch for sexually harassing scores of female employees in the company.
Though it happened in 2016, I barely remember any of the real-life events that inspired this movie. And, because it’s something that happened barely three years ago in real life, I’m not going to relay any discussion of the events in the movie, but I’ll happily monologue about the movie itself.
For starters: Charlize Theron made an outstanding Megyn Kelly, to the point where I couldn’t recognize Theron in costume, and when I googled the real Kelly later, it would have been very easy to believe they were just on-set pictures of Theron. Kudos to whomever did that casting choice.
Nichole Kidman played ex-news-anchor Gretchen Carlson. Kidman wore a prosthetic chin with a distinct cleft that was surprisingly distracting and entirely not part of Carlson’s face, so I have no idea why the makeup team made that addition.
Margot Robbie played Kayla Pospisil. I have no idea if Pospisil is a real person of she was one of those amalgamation personalities that the opening title card acknowledged had been made for this retelling. Robbie, who is only two years older than me, looked to be about 22 in this, and played Pospisil to be the same: a fresh-faced, wide-eyed girl waiting to make it big on the news channel that her family watched religiously.
And the final important character: Roger Ailes was played by John Lithgow, who once again played an outstanding villain. He wore a fat suit for a majority of the movie, though the volume of said suit changed as necessary whenever they did a flashback to a prior years. Lithgow previously played the horrifying ‘Trinity Killer’ in season 3 of “Dexter.”
Character introductions were almost exclusively handled by on-screen labels and never by dialog. Whenever a new character appeared, a bold line of text with their name and a smaller line of text with their job title/description showed up somewhere explaining exactly who they were. It was a clean, unobtrusive, and incredibly helpful way to constantly show new characters, especially when some of them didn’t appear till the last 10 minutes of the movie and thus didn’t have time to get introduced by-name to the audience.
Parts of this movie also relied on digital communication: texts, screen shots, twitter posts, etc., even including the swirling Fox News icon at one point. Just like “The Big Short” (2015) did, those icons and images simply appeared on-screen, large enough to be visible but small enough to not take up too much realty, to help tell the story or show what a character was looking at on their phone.
An incredibly minor detail: every single iPhone was year-appropriate. Every model from the 6 to the 8s (2014-2018) was almost visually indistinguishable from every other model, except that the 7-series and later didn’t have a headphone jack, while everything from the X to now is a full-screen design with no home button. While Megan didn’t notice anything about the phones, it was something I saw. It was an entirely irrelevant thing to get right for a movie that took place in 2016 when home buttons and headphone jacks were still a thing, but they got it right regardless, and it’s tiny details like that that I adore.
Progression-wise, the script did a good job of keeping us informed of when events were happening. Any time there was a timeline change of any significance, a little date appeared in one of the corners telling us what month/year we were in, which was particularly helpful during a couple of flashback scenes.
On average, movies are hit-or-miss for how well they portray time jumps, which is why I’m highlighting it here.
As I mentioned above, this flick was about Ailes harassment of female Fox employees, and the sexual assault suit that Gretchen Carlson filed against him (if I had to guess, Carlson was part of the push to get this movie made).
Watching Ailes abuse his power to abuse women was stomach-churning.
While I joked about how horrifying “Cats” was, Ailes’s behavior was truly disgusting, displaying nothing but the utmost corruption of power dynamics by someone who believed themselves to be above the law and inexplicably in the right.
There were some political things included, because it was about Fox New and much of the events in this happened parallel to the run up to the 2016 election, but you need to put aside your partisan position to see this; not because I want you to be uncomfortable as you watch Ailes objectify women and get away with it, but because it’s part of a continuing problem in the workplace.
This happened two years before the #MeToo movement, and I’m impressed that Ailes was fired - though Fox settled out of court and Ailes got his contract bonus, so he wasn’t really punished - but sexual harassment still happens and I’m sure it’s still happening over at Fox News.
There’s a larger conversation at hand about when it’s right to report sexual harassment. As many characters noted to Kelly: if you speak out, it’s my ass on the line. There’s a lot of weight and truth in that; regular joes and joettes just trying to get by and live a happy life, but if the boat rocks too much, that could put it all in jeopardy. Similarly, if you’re the only one raising a complaint, then you stand out like a sore thumb and become and easy/immediate target as simply not a team player or someone out for lawsuit money.
A handful of women spoke up about Bill Cosby’s sexual harassment years before the main movement, but it wasn’t until there was a critical mass of victims of his abuse that the public at large finally decided to listen and he went to court and finally got the jail time he deserved.
So.
To the final question of the movie:
When do you speak up?
