Fourteen minutes into “Bombshell”, Gretchen Carlson meets with a pair of lawyers. She’s preparing to file a suit against her boss, Roger Ailes, for sexual harassment. Her unwillingness to capitulate to his demands has earned her a demotion at work. Moved to a slot in the afternoon dead-zone, she explains that her inability to be conciliatory has landed her in second base at the network. At that moment the scene freezes and Carlson’s voice-over interrupts us over-head. “Back in Minnesota, before I graduated summa cum laude from Stanford, before I was crowned Miss America, I played second-base in the sixth-grade softball league.” The frame unfreezes and she looks out-at-the-camera, breaking the fourth-wall to speak to tell us, “I hate second base”. This moment, minor in the film’s narrative is such an effective distillation of the tonal weirdness of “Bombshell”. It’s full of so many gestures that ultimately serve little purpose.
At this point in the film we’ve only just met Gretchen, so Charles Randolph seems to want to ensure that his script tell us as much as it can early on. Except, it’s hardly an incisive point about Gretchen to note that she hates being second. Who doesn’t? The voice-over, interrupting the narrative to address the audience, is part of the film’s stylistic mockumentary underpinning but in this specific moment and at large, it seems to add little that’s incisive. And, this typifies much of “Bombshell,” which is best represented by that same kind of sloppy flatness. Numerous moments in the film occur without any kind of foresight in mind. On occasion, the film summons enough focus to chillingly present the opprobriousness of harassment at Fox News, but more often than not any random frame of the film formally, aesthetically, and philosophically is more likely to elicit befuddlement as to its intention.
“Bombshell” utilises a rambling, expansive structure but it’s best established as a film about the way Ailes, Fox News CEO, exploits and harasses the women that pass through his office. The central act is a lawsuit that Carlson launches against Ailes after being unceremoniously fired after years of harassment and demotion, but her centrality is superficial. That arc is countered by the film’s positioning of an ambivalent Megyn Kelly, a star at Fox, as the protagonist who must decide whether to coolly deflect from playing victim (despite her own harassment by Ailes in the past) and the rise of Kayla Popisil as a would-be up-and-comer at the network. Kelly and Carlson are real women. Popisil is not. But, the story is true and legion. Men in positions of power exploiting their powerless peers. That story is hard to argue against. In a scene of unrelenting horror in the middle of the film, Popisil is gleeful to have a chance to have a private meeting with Ailes. She’ll be able to make her case for a role in front of the cameras. Her glee soon plateaus. Ailes insists she raise her dress to show her legs. This is a visual medium, after all. He’s not satisfied until she’s bared her legs and her panties for him, as he sits ferociously panting and disgusting. The moment works at establishing the puerile perversion of the harassment. The film itself, though, never works as a text divorced from brief moments of value.
A few moments before that scene the three women all travel in an elevator – all heading to a different location. Carlson thinks she’s headed to Ailes, but is foiled by his secretary when she realises it’s Popisil. Nicole Kidman plays Carlson’s realisation in a way that’s more nuanced than the film argues for or even deserves. It’s a look of disbelief both that what she suspects will happen is about to happen, but it’s also a look of longing. That moment, courtesy of Kidman, does more than the unnecessary “I hate second-base” line. It speaks to the way the women at Fox are forced into seeing each other as enemies for Roger’s favour than colleagues in solidarity. It’s a look that speaks to something complex here, Kidman is the best of the trio, resisting the flatness of the film which Charlize Theron as Kelly often falls prey to. How to make sense of the horrors these women face, reduced to sexual objects, while recognising that they are voluntarily part of an organisation that partakes in the exclusion of women and people of colour? “Bombshell” will not ask that question, and that’s to its detriment. The film can only understand its trio of women as victims if their identities are mostly scrubbed clean of too many offensive truths about their characters.
“Bombshell” dresses its clumsy ideological flatness in a film that’s as narratively and formally imprecise as its politics. Randolph employs the frenetic pacing and fourth-wall breaking that he used in “The Big Short”, while director Jay Roach’s appreciation for real-persons as fodder for ironic detachment is also on full display. But “Bombshell” never articulates any consideration or idea of why that style makes sense for this story. Instead, that decision, like the film, feels more marked by rushed thoughtlessness than much else. After the film opens with the voice-over where Kelly stops to address the audience, by a quarter way into its runtime it seems as if it’s forgotten this stylistic inclination and abandons it. It makes for a structural sloppiness that emphasises the film’s already frustrating atonality.
All this formal sloppiness might be forgiven if the film had a clear philosophical through-line, but “Bombshell” is marked by its own philosophical cowardice. It’s happy to confront the micro person-to-person dynamic of Ailes’ sexual perversion but it will not confront the macro public facing weight of Fox’s role as a partisan hate-organisation. Roach and Randolph seem afraid that if they confront the limitations of these women it would make its critique of sexual harassment less effective. In an early scene we watch snatches of Kelly’s infamous “Santa is white” segment, reminding us of the myopic bigotry of this woman. The ideology is best summed up in a condescending sequence where Carlson compliments a baby in a supermarket only for the mother to recoil, aghast at Carlson’s own complicity in the Fox-News narrative (significantly, none of this – including Carlson’s own role in the Obama-Birther-narrative is ever shown). The camera stays on Kidman as Carlson chastises the woman for being rude to persons with a difference of opinion. “Bombshell” expects us to take that seriously, as if we should ignore the reality of what we do know of these people.
The moment is galling and emblematic of the film’s blinkered view and underestimation of its audience. “Bombshell” wants it both ways. We’re supposed to come to it already knowledgeable about the implications of the real world. When actor after actor turns up for a cameo as this or that Fox personality, the film never explains their importance. We’re meant to intuit because we’re meant to know the story. Yet Roach and Randolph insist on playing fast-and-loose with what we know of these women, resisting any complication of their role as truth-tellers in this story. When Popisil announces that her family lives-and-breathes the air of Fox News, convinced that her friend is only ironically hanging a picture of Hillary Clinton in her apartment, the film can’t reckon with the larger question of what that means.
The real story of “Bombshell” is the way that the systems these women endorsed and created couldn’t save them. It’s a betrayal of mega proportions where women like Kelly and Carlson (and the fictional Popisil) were used to make grand political statements, but were ignored by the system they worked for when they needed it. Neither Roach nor Randolph has the foresight to recognise that. So, we are left with ambivalent nonsense. “Bombshell” isn’t even sure what its own point is. Does it have anything to say about sexual harassment? White women’s complicity? The inelegance of Fox-news lip service? It doesn’t. All it has is empty posturing, galling for its own lack of foresight.
“Bombshell” is currently playing at Caribbean Cinemas Guyana and MovieTowne Guyana
