Review: BOMBSHELL

We begin on the surface as Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly takes us for a tour around the Fox News offices. It's a world-wise but client facing monologue, just enough public professionalism, just enough sassy cynicism to make it feel human. So far it feels like The Big Short, the sprawling media-savvy epic of the GFC from a few years back. But we're not in for that kind of movie, this one is far more along the road of nuanced powerplay where films like All the President's Men live. Changes in the balance of power happen slowly and subtly as a result of out of office meetings or overhead phone conversations, of legal meetings where little is said directly and private consultations which can lead to downfalls.

In 2016 a lawsuit was brought against Fox CEO for sexual harrassment by a number of female staff. Each one of the plaintiffs stood to lose their jobs at Fox and perhaps all of US broadcasting as a result. It's a kind of Me Too origins episode.

The capsule moment in this film happens when young and ambitious Kyla sneaks a face to face with the CEO and ends up twirling before him and raising her dress until he sees her underwear. This has been done by such tiny degrees that she has hardly had time to notice the situation skidding out of her control. The moment I'm thinking of is when starts to reveal her legs, feels compressed and awkward and lets out a small embarrassed laugh and does a kind of squirming dance move. She has no other way of coping. Roger the Hutt is just doing it all by remote from his office chair and she's almost leaving her body. After a cinematic caesura she returns to her desk ashen and numb.

That tiny gesture feels like the last call for protest before her path is cast and it is pointedly twice performative being Margot Robbie understanding Kyla to the point of embodiment. Seldom has an onscreen sexual violation carried such weight. The only one I can properly compare it to is the scene in Neil La Bute's In The Company of Men where Chad demands to see the balls of a lower-rung staffer. There's an intensely uncomfortable creepiness about both but the Kyla/Ailes' scene wins (if that's the word) for its extra commitment. It's the only time we'll have to see this in the film. Other instances are either told in shorthand without need to be explicit or given a different approach (there's a strong inner monologue vs spoken response scene that works to a different effect but deserves mention).

The story is told as a triple stream converging in the final act. It concentrates on Megyn Kelly's story as she is at the peak of her power but the parallel tales of Gretchen Carlson and Kyla Pospisil are given distinct arcs that tell of one anchorwoman being edged out of her career and the third only starting hers. The title Bombshell and poster art triptych of Theron, Kidman and Robbie takes a ride on the notion of the blonde bombshell but the bombshell is one of litigation and the charging anger that fuelled it. For once the teaser for a current film is actually a teasing thing, making use of the confusion of the title. Clever. No, really, genuinely clever.

Theron's Megyn Kelly is all American Patrician, controlling her voice and expression according to the proximity of mics and cameras, in poised control but with the wily alertness of a lawyer. Theron uses the lowest register she has and the effect is less of perfect diction than continuously packaged information. Kidman as Gretchen Carlson plays for controlled frustration, building a case methodically, biting her lip at setbacks and keeping it cool in front of her kids. It's an actively still performance, possibly the hardest one to pull off but she does. Margot Robbie is at least free of a true life point of comparison as her character is a composite. From her scene described above she moves and speaks with a gathering wisdom. As Roger Ailes John Lithgow is a mesa of entitlement brought to physical dependency by a life of others' service, not without a supportive acknowledgement or his own wisdom. His uncontrolled sexual hunger in the scene with Robbie tells us he still thinks he's about seventeen.

Bombshell works and works against expectations that it might be more of a flamboyantly cynical satire like something by Sidney Lumet or Robert Altman but that opening tour is there to establish the status quo, not to unseat it, that comes later. It does beg your patience to follow leads that might not thrill but will form a pattern of behaviour that will form a massive tapestry of privilege and abuse and how the response to it had to work. It's single sides of phone calls, glances, meetings with closed shutters and unwritten rules writ large upon the light. This might be the tale of food fights at the carnival end of the news spectrum but it describes the heart of the Murdoch Modor, lightless and throbbing under the natural-look surface, without which wars might have been clipped by diplomacy and presidential candidates might have been buried under stadiums that rang with mockery. So, it matters. It's also bloody effective.

Review: 1917

Lance Corporals Blake and Scofield are woken from their slumber in a field by a sergeant who orders them to the general's tent where they are given a written order to be delivered through an extremely hazardous route. If they get through they will save thousands of lives. They set off through the British trenches to the point where they have to leave the protection of their own troops and go cross country.

That's the plot of the film. Thin? Well, it's war torn France near the end of WWI and the journey is the thing. Also, there's a plot point that my refusal to reveal severely limits my giving further detail. With a run time of a single minute under two hours, what is there left to say?

The look and landscape of WWI has been so well served throughout the history of cinema that refreshing it for a contemporary drama might seem unlikely. What Sam Mendes has chosen to do here is to suggest wars beyond it and even, perhaps, before it. The uniforms and haircuts are all correct. The bi-planes that buzz through the air can be done with CG. There's even a British Mk 1 tank upturned in a trench. However, the prospect of survival, moment to moment, and any scene that digs into the noise and destruction of warfare might as well be Crimean or Roman. The approach is not so much to present The Great War but to suggest war itself.

This can be overreached. There are decisions made by characters that need post hoc reasoning by audience members rather than flow from the circumstances. The course of this film could at several points be mistaken for a feature length theme park ride and at several other points resembles a first person shooter game more than a tough cinematic epic. But there we venture into one of the swamps of contemporary cinema: is a film lessened by its resemblance, however briefly, to another form or might that just be an expansion into greater culture. As an example outside of this one, I detest the previous decade's trend in mainstream horror to present a series of evenly timed jump scares. When I came to understand that this had been arrived at to cater to a young audience as equally engaged with their phones (and the wider connection through them) as they were with the film blaring and jolting in front of them. To understand is not necessarily to forgive (I still hate those films) but becomes indispensable. So, when we drop from a shooty-tooty bombed out village to a white water rapid rush we have to remember not to be too flat in our response. That can be a good thing as it just means that a movie is a movie and that can and should mean anything.

It surprises me that the "single take" trope has been paraded out for this one in the publicity as the experience of it is efficient and correctly unremarkable. When this became a trend in the 00s and beyond (e.g. Irreversible) we were instructed to marvel at it. Well, it was a feat, even if it really was (with very very few exceptions) one of good camera choreography and expert editing. Here, it adds an immediacy and sense of alertness and readiness to shift gear on a two cent piece. It's done so seamlessly and is so appropriate that this egg who notices editing forgot about it as a feature.

So, why make a movie about a war from over a century ago? Because war is war and whether its fought with dirty bombs or sticks and stones we will probably never shake it. 1917 is careful to let us know that notions of heroism are best left for the officers and media and that one journey through a constant threat of annihilation is the same as a million others when you're going through it. Some might well find some of the final scenes played for an emotional singalong but they struck me as controlled anguish. (But, really, go and watch Paths of Glory, sit through the final scene and tell me you didn't well up ... just a bit.) The final image is one of exhaustion which, as history has it, always seems to be war's last word.

Review: LITTLE WOMEN

Jo, Meg, Amy, Beth are ready to take on the world with their talents and ambition and they would were it not for the fact that they are poor (if genteel) and live during the American Civil War: prospect grim but for astute marriages, a point made the centre of Jo's meeting with a publisher. This film is about girls making choices, squandering them, being robbed of them by life or having them made on their behalf. For them the world is corsetted, crinolined and parloured where a girl's talents might grant them points on a marriage resume but, as with all their politics, tastes, joys and anger, are to be kept in place as "parts" rather than pursued as careers. As the 19th century source novel by the highly motivated and political Louisa May Alcott observes this as an expectation it also allows voice to the ambition. After Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig could not have made a choice more apt for her next feature.

The novel is a classic of American literature and beloved enough to have generated film adaptations from the silent era to now. Most of these concentrate on the girls' pursuit of marriage and the closer we come to this one, more of the undercurrents emerge. Gerwig's approach is to push the latter to the foreground, keep the marital stakes important but leave the weight of them to the other attempts for further discovery. This allows her to enhance the episodic nature of the source by managing the timeline according theme or character rather than a linear reading more appropriate for literature than cinema. At first this can be puzzling but only lightly so and as soon as you get the hang of it you relax into it and enjoy the episodes. The sense of an overall arc builds and the shifting of the time zones is deft rather than just stylistic.

Casting is key, as always. Saoirse Ronan as Jo shines, bringing fire and intellect (and frequent visits from Dublin in her accent: but with an actor this fine I just don't care). Meryl Streep clearly relishes the role of the grand dame Aunt March, adding sharp character to her patrician haughtiness. Emma Watson (whose accent also falters intermittently) brings a subdued suffering to her role and a sense that her character's strength lies in maintenance of the fragility of the humbleness she grows into. Laura Dern as the girls' mother, is the grown up version of that, endlessly supportive but feels every blow in private. It is Florence Pugh as Amy who I wanted to see more of, though. Amy's story struck me as a tougher battle, accepting her limitations as an aspirant artist, living as second best to Jo but biting on the bitterness to claim herself. It might be the performance that suffers her character's fate in the long run but for me it was the one I constantly waited for when it wasn't on screen. After the similarly thankless turn in Midsommar this year this just shows her growing fast as an artist. With all that Timothee Chalamet might well be trampled into obscurity but the easy aristocratic charm that hides his own frustrations at the world's constraints.

Gerwig is careful to balance the look and feel of the setting without giving in to the period drama wash which is why her parlour scenes always have a touch of claustrophobia to them. The shot of debutantes climbing the stairs with their hooped skirts creating a kind of traffic jam is funny, beautiful and mindful of the culture that demands it. The relief of the outdoors is palpable and a scene on a cold beach with Jo comforting the ailing Beth with the sand lifting in the wind in silvery wisps could have come from a Tarkovsky movie. This is a bitchy thing to say but in two features Gerwig has completely outclassed the entire output of her life and oft times creative partner Noah Baumbach. If he had done this it would have been hipsters in crinolines. Gerwig just makes it work.