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.