In theory, director Jay Roach's Bombshell addresses its subject matter in the right way. It's the second dramatization of the Roger Ailes scandal released this year after Showtime's The Loudest Voice, yet sets itself apart from that TV miniseries by focusing less on Ailes and more on the women (real and, in this case, fictional) responsible for his downfall. The resulting film certainly deals with topical issues, but its ill-advised - forgive the wording - fair and balanced outlook does more harm than good. Bombshell is a competent dramatization that's hurt by its apolitical approach to the story it's telling, and struggles to provide fresh insight.
Bombshell revolves around three women working at Fox News circa 2015-2016: news anchor Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron), Fox & Friends-turned daytime program host Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman), and associate producer/wannabe anchor Kayla Pospisil (Margot Robbie). Like everyone else at Fox News, the trio ultimately answer to Ailes (John Lithgow), the media empire's CEO and a paranoid, ill-tempered man who fosters a sexist work environment that encourages sensationalist reporting in an effort to earn big ratings among the network's core conservative base. But when Carlson files a lawsuit against Fox alleging Ailes sexually harassed her, it opens the floodgates for other women to come forward with their own stories about his sexual misconduct. Question is, will someone as influential as Kelly take a stand with her?
The overriding issue with Bombshell is that it wants to put the politics aside (so to speak) and look at sexual harrassment as a non-partisan issue. In order to that, however, it presents Carlson and Kelly as being "strong women", yet goes out of its way to avoid scrutinizing their core beliefs and often contradictory actions and words. The film doesn't hide their political views (Theron actually recreates Kelly's infamous on-air comments about Jesus and Santa during one scene), but it's unwilling to really hold their feet to the fire and present them as being messy and complicated people who nevertheless deserve sympathy for what they had to suffer. Equally problematic is Pospisil, a composite character whose arc from being a blind er of Fox News to being empowered rings hollow, and is dubiously handed Bombshell's most explicit moment of sexual harassment. Even the film's juxtaposition of Kelly's pushback against Donald Trump for his misogynistic behavior during the 2016 Republican presidential primaries and her longstanding for Ailes feels oddly toothless, as though it's meant to prove she really is a feminist crusader (no matter how much she, quite earnestly, tells people she's not in the film).
Theron, Kidman, and Robbie all do fine work in their roles here, though Theron and Kidman still fall into the trap of delivering a better impersonation (see also: Theron's eerie resemblance to Kelly) than performance. Robbie has the hardest job of the three since her character doesn't really affect the outcome of Bombshell's narrative - and is saddled with a subplot involving Kate McKinnon's Jess Carr (a closeted queer liberal woman who's stuck working at Fox News) that comes across as the movie's flimsy attempt to not be one-sided in its portrait of Fox's employees - but she plays her role with conviction all the same. Lithgow doesn't treat Ailes like a caricature either, and he captures his hubris and blustering attitude as gracefully as his insecurities and refusal to even it to his own toxic behavior. The rest of the cast is full of talented character actors (Connie Britton, Mark Duplass, Allison Janney, Richard Kind, Kidman's Big Little Lies costar Robin Weigert, and so on), though their scenes have a habit of devolving into a parade of one-note caricatures of real-life individuals.
Off-camera, Charles Randolph's Bombshell screenplay employs many of the same tricks as his script for The Big Short (which he co-wrote with Adam McKay) did to make this story more cinematic, including having characters break the fourth wall and using visual storytelling tools like graphics to bring viewers up to speed on everything they need to know. Combined with Barry Ackroyd's journalistic cinematography (lots of handheld camerawork and snap-zooms), this approach comes off feeling less inventive this time around, but is still effective and keeps the film moving at a lively, brisk pace. Roach similarly utilizes some of the same techniques as he did on on his previous docudramas like Game Change, blending real archival footage with clips of the movie's cast in character to lend the proceedings a stronger sense of verisimilitude. At the end of the day, though, Bombshell doesn't really look or feel particularly different from Roach's previous true story-based TV features.
It all adds up to the same thing: Bombshell is a well-intentioned attempt to reach across the political divide and provide an uplifting message for victims of sexual harassment, but telling an "unbiased" story about the women of Fox News (maybe unsurprisingly) isn't a great way to go about doing that. Perhaps if the film took a more challenging or possibly satirical approach or featured a woman (especially a woman of color) as a writer and/or director, it might've found a way to achieve its goals. Instead, Bombshell amounts to a capable re-enactment that doesn't have much of anything new to add to the Roger Ailes story. It's not exploitive, though, and some viewers may find Bombshell to be suitably informative and tasteful in its presentation - but for others, it's probably going to have all the problems you're expecting from a movie that wants to make you root for someone like Megyn Kelly.
Bombshell is now playing in U.S. theaters nationwide. It is 108 minutes long and is rated R for sexual material and language throughout.
Based on the true story, Bombshell is a drama film that retells the story of three women who attempt to take Fox News CEO Roger Ailes to task for sexual harassment and to dismantle the boys club that rules over the network. The film takes liberties with the story for dramatization purposes but captures the uphill battle the women face as they try to force ability on the colossal news broadcast group.
