Bombshell

As “Bombshell” opens, Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron) breaks the fourth wall by taking us on a tour of the Fox News television studios where she works, not so much explaining reporting or interviewing as the network’s infamous proclivity for dressing its typically blonde anchors in provocative clothing and then honoring ZZ Top’s most famous battle cry for the camera. It’s not a bad opening, hinting at a kind of cable news “Casino”, going behind the scenes, glimpsed in a changing room where so many revealing dresses are lined up on endless racks or, best of all, an argument between Megyn Kelly and Jeanine Pirro (Alanna Ubach) at a vending machine briefly teasing amusing empty cinematic calories. Ultimately, however, director Jay Roach’s film is less interested in the rise of Fox News then its fall. Well, not its fall, of course, since it is still chugging along, guiding our national interest, then the fall of its founder, Roger Ailes, which saved face but didn’t fix the problem, an irony that “Bombshell” both does and doesn’t see.

The ball gets rolling, as it did in real life, when Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) meets with her lawyers about filing a harassment suit against Ailes (John Lithgow), which comes to fruition when she finally gets fired, ushered out for a younger, prettier thing, the fictional Kayla Pospisil (Margot Robbie), a moment where Kidman evinces the writing on the figurative wall with a wry comical, ironical bent. If the movie’s opening, however, suggests that what Fox News puts into the world correlates to society’s sexual misconduct, Charles Randolph’s screenplay forgoes a broader examination of this idea to just sort of pin the whole problem on Ailes, which Lithgow’s performance willingly receives by just angrily lashing out as he comes under scrutiny, any sense of the character as his own kind of disturbing visionary mostly jettisoned to paint him as a sin-eating Pizza the Hutt.

Despite exclusively focusing on America’s foremost conservative television channel, “Bombshell” also shows its stripes as a wannabe Hollywood prestige movie, trying to cater to Tinseltown’s liberals and/or Liberal Elites™ by sanding down both Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly. That’s why we first meet Gretchen discussing her lawsuit, setting her up as a feminist warrior, while Megyn’s first major plot point is deciding to take on the future 45th President in his infamous first Republican debate. Any sense of the women’s hyper-partisan politics are deliberately siphoned out, the characters flattened out to render them palatable for All Audiences, simultaneously foiling the overriding point that we should stand with anyone, politics aside, in the face of sexual harassment.

Kidman, while having less screen time than her other co-stars, still carves out a solid performance, despite being subjected to a few grotesque “humanizing” moments, like a grocery store encounter. No, in the feminist stances Gretchen takes over the air, Kidman’s bearing conveys the hopelessness of such a cause in the Fox News environment, a former Miss America making like Pvt. Vasquez and falling on the grenade to little avail. That’s the other interesting angle, one that Randolph’s screenplay senses, not only alluding to it in the movie’s postscript but partially tailoring Megyn’s storyline around it.

When Gretchen files her suit, she’s hoping others will join her crusade, including Megyn. She plays coy, though, which is what Theron’s performance, apart from its impeccable voice mimicry and the accompanying work by the makeup department, suggests. Alas, “Bombshell” itself plays coy, too, about its characters bartering their sexuality for power. In fact, the film tries to elide its real characters’ compromises by giving them cover with the fictional Kayla who, eventually fed up, walks out. Self-described as an “evangelical millennial”, one who takes Fox News as gospel, Robbie exaggerates the character’s innocence, even though the script does little favors in her two-dimensionality. Still, she’s mesmerizing in the scene where the unfortunate reality overwhelms her, as if her fragility is breaking right before our very eyes. In that moment, she confronts the inconvenient truth in a way “Bombshell” never can.