Downtown Bombshell
Yesterday was another day of rest for me. I was enjoying being back home after three weeks away, so I just lazed around opening mail, sorting through motorcycle gear, organizing stuff, watching a bit of MSNBC to catch up on the news (though I must say these days none of us is further away from it than our smartphones) and waiting for our evening adventure. Kim had booked us for another SAG/AFTRA movie premier.
While away we had missed the release of Joker, the dark Joaquin Phoenix thriller about urban violence and the birth of a Batman nemesis. I will see that today with my mild-mannered son who finds it and The Dark Knight Rises to be favorites in their “Why so serious?” way. But last night’s premier was of Bombshell, the latest Charlize Theron film that co-stars Nichole Kidman, Margot Robbie and John Lithgow. Charlize, Nichole and Lithgow were in attendance after the show on stage, as were Jay Roach, Director, and Charles Randolph, writer. It is the story of the Fox News sexual harassment saga by Roger Ailes.
I recently binge-watched the The Loudest Voice in the Room on Showtime. It was the adaptation of the Gabriel Sherman book about Roger Ailes. It starred Russell Crowe as Ailes and was a rather graphic depiction of the life of someone who very much set the stage for American conservative politics from Nixon through Trump. Some might go so far as to say that Roger Ailes is the person most responsible for the current Trump phenomenon (or fiasco, if you think like me). In the sense of “know your enemy” as suggested by Sun Tzu, I found it extraordinarily intriguing to better understand this seemingly vile man who some say was both charming and caring in his own way, but who everyone would admit was tremendously impactful. At the time, I thought how perfect Russell Crowe was as the portly and aging Ailes who retained his lust for power, gorgeous women and influence, right to the very end.
I recommend both The Loudest Voice in the Room and Bombshell to anyone asking themselves why we are where we are in this country today both with our political mess and our gender mess. As for the gender issue, there is probably a bigger story to be told about Harvey Weinstein, but that may not come out until the legal dust settles. Roger Ailes’ death in 2017 makes it safe to tell his story to its conclusion and the impact of Fox News makes the mix of gender and politics as told through cable news, a very powerful story medium to say the least.
One of the first things I noticed about the film was how hard it was to keep the three actresses straight. I am certain, just by looking at the promotional poster with the three blondes lined up one next to the other, that Jay Roach intended us to see them as near carbon copies of one another. Indeed, it was a theme of Ailes’ approach to broadcasting that you gave viewers what they wanted to see and what they wanted to see most was pretty blondes with lots of leg and cleavage showing. The glass stage tables were no accident. They were all “soldiers” in the war, and he says the soldiers dress alike so that they all know they are expendable. These blonde on-screen news anchors also needed to know that they too were all expendable. That is the edge that he had in getting them all to do his bidding in private to various degrees. The game ranged from getting them to twirl and lift their skirts for him to giving him oral sex without him ever bothering to drop his pants. But regardless of the sexual favor extracted, the reward was always the same, opportunity and exposure to become a TV news on-screen celebrity.
Lithgow, wearing a fat suit and a four-part facial prosthesis was very convincing as a dirty old angry man. But the more convincing portrayals were by Ailes’ secretary played by Holland Taylor and by Kate McKinnon, who plays a lesbian, closet-Democrat, associate producer for Bill O’Reilly. The Jeffrey Epstein episode makes us all aware of the insidious role in sexual harassment that gets played by the enablers of the evil-doers. Roger Ailes’ secretary is portrayed (merely in a minor, but shocking instance) as a recruiter of young attractive staffers for Ailes to prey on, as he does with Margot Robbie’s character. As for McKinnon, I would like to know if Charles Randolph wrote her character in as a humorous counter-cultural (in a Fox sense) example of how some people work at Fox despite their views rather than because of their views. I almost tend to think that McKinnon’s natural and effusive comedic sense and manner may have caused that role to be far funnier than intended. A favorite scene is with her and Margot Robbie in bed during a lesbian hook-up when she explains that the only job she could get was at Fox and now that she was working at Fox, no one else would hire her for fear that she was infected with their brand of conservative ethos.
The main story is about the conflicted nature of sexual harassment from the female perspective. The avoidance of the Harvey Weinstein story was easy given the timeframe of the story, which predates Harvey’s exposure. But the avoidance off the Access Hollywood bus incident with Trump and Billy Bush must have been intentional to avoid confusing the viewer with too much shocking political reality and thereby taking away from the internal business angst of deciding to bring action against the omnipotent Ailes. Seeing Jeanine Pirro walking around the office admonishing young women to remember where their bread was buttered was chilling. Watching Theron (Megyn Kelly) and Kidman (Gretchen Carlson) look at each other knowingly was powerful. You could feel the internal and external conflict of wanting to succeed, wanting to unmask Ailes, wanting to successfully compete against one another, wanting to defend their own, all happening at once. They were like two adult lionesses eyeing each other as they faced a raging water buffalo. The awareness that loyalties must pivot on a dime to the needs of the situation and the realization that the water buffalo could help either one by goring the other lioness, was never lost. At the same time, the lionesses recognized that they were the same species and should defend one another even though it would be done without outright bilateral support. This was a complex dance to choreograph and I must say, Jay Roach handled it well.
In the grand scheme of the war, this bombshell may or may not have really mattered much to the global landscape. Ailes would have likely hit his head and died of his hemophilia anyway. The ending trailer said that the two women settled for $50MM and Ailes and O’Reilly got severance of $65MM. Did it change the world? Maybe not. Is it good storytelling and great cinema? For sure.