A clever title, “Bombshell.” It refers not just to an explosive revelation but also (to use the slang of a more leering age) to a figure of such allure that she leaves a blast area wherever she lands. Hence the calculated infamy that M-G-M, long ago, spun around Jean Harlow. One result was “Bombshell” (1933), in which she plays a movie star whom nobody will leave alone—not her agent, not her family, and not the moony suitor who tells her, “I’d like to run barefoot through your hair.”
I reckon that Harlow, who saw through men as if they were made of cellophane, would applaud the new “Bombshell,” directed by Jay Roach, for its sterling trinity of heroines: Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron), Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman), and Kayla Pospisil (Margot Robbie). None of them are as blindingly blond as Harlow, or as instantly outspoken, but all three summon the nerve to take a stand. The most Harlovian of the trio is Kelly, who begins by addressing us as she marches through the offices at Fox News. She is, of course, a real person, as is Carlson; when “America Live with Megyn Kelly” concluded, in September, 2013, allowing Kelly to move to prime time, the afternoon slot was taken by “The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson.” Ah, the real! You can’t beat it.
Actually, you can. If truth is golden, that means you can melt it, bend it, flake it, fake it, or pound it into dust. There is even a version for fools. Fox News is hardly the first organization to take advantage of such mutability, but it was there—under the aegis of Roger Ailes, who was the chairman and C.E.O. from 1996 to 2016, and who died in 2017—that the reshaping of the actual was raised to a fine and furious art. Reality, for Ailes, was something you knead.
He is played in the film by John Lithgow, with the aid of what I sincerely hope is a pile of blubbery makeup. Either that or Lithgow lunched and dined on lasagna and banana splits for a year before filming commenced. He’s such a cheerful and likable actor, and that makes it all the more startling to find him as the villain of the piece. Initially, indeed, he appears to do the decent thing. When Kelly moderates a Republican Presidential debate, in August, 2015, and then is insulted by Donald Trump for having challenged his misogyny, Ailes supports her. But is that because he genuinely backs her cause, or because he sniffs the scent of public battle, and with it a rise in the ratings?
We know the answer, and the proof is provided by Kayla Pospisil, who describes herself as “an evangelical millennial,” from a Midwestern family that regards Fox News as “church.” Freshly arrived at the inner sanctum, as a production assistant, she glows with aspiration, and wrangles a one-on-one with Ailes to plead her case. He tests her loyalty by asking her to stand before him and lift her skirt. “Higher,” he says, “Higher.” He hunkers down in his chair, steaming and snorting like a bull in a stall. This scene is the dark heart of the film; we are observing the effects of sexual abuse and emotional blackmail in real time, enacted with maximum intensity by Margot Robbie, and what’s unforgettable are the tears of mortification that tremble in her eyes. Innocence can be lost in a matter of minutes.
There’s a problem, though. Kayla does not exist. She’s a composite of various witnesses to Ailes’s gross misconduct, and, although there’s absolutely no doubting the credibility of what her character suffers, the mingling of fact and fiction sits a little uneasily in a movie that is dedicated to the righting of wrongs. As often occurs with topical tales, which are hellbent on catching a widespread mood (in this instance, anger and disgust), there’s something hasty and undigested about “Bombshell.” The screenplay is by Charles Randolph, who co-wrote “The Big Short” (2015), with Adam McKay, and, as in that movie, the action is relentlessly sliced and diced. Why, we could almost be watching TV!
Thus, we are suddenly offered video clips of Ailes’s real-life victims, identified by their first names, testifying to his oppressive deeds. But how are we meant to square the brunt of this hard evidence, distressing as it is, with other people’s sly and clearly scripted confessions to camera? When Carlson loses her show at Fox, for example, she informs her lawyers that she feels demoted to second base, before turning to us and adding, sotto voce, “I hate second base.” Whereas Theron, as Kelly, is a force of nature, not relinquishing command of the role for a second, Kidman seems oddly unsettled as Carlson, perhaps because the movie plants her at third base, behind the other two leads. I can’t help recalling how secure, and how triumphantly mean, Kidman was in “To Die For” (1995), in which she played a weather forecaster so ambitious that nothing, including murder, was permitted to get in her way. That film was as mischievous as “Bombshell” is militant, and, on the surface, it had far less to impart. Which of the two, I wonder, will endure?
History records that Kelly and Carlson, both of whom had once been put under sexual pressure by Ailes, left Fox News and went elsewhere. We are told, at the end of the film, that the victims’ settlement packages were significantly less than what Ailes himself received from the company. Onscreen, he is given a gentle sendoff by Rupert Murdoch (Malcolm McDowell), who listens to his protestations and says, “There’s no audience for that side of the story.” Note the casting: Murdoch, the big unfriendly giant of modern media, is played by the guy who, back in 1971, had his eyelids clamped open in “A Clockwork Orange,” the better to cram his brain with visions of outrage and dread. Fantastic.
If you come out of “Bombshell,” take a deep breath, then dive back into the dark for a screening of “Invisible Life,” what will you find? More of the same. There are no lawyers here, and no TV studios, but, once again, women’s wishes are tailored to fit the will of men. Two Brazilian women, in particular: Guida (Julia Stockler) and her younger sister, Eurídice (Carol Duarte), who are as close as siblings can be. (They actually look like siblings, too—a surprising rarity in movies.) It’s unimaginable that they could be torn asunder. Get ready to imagine.
Apart from a present-day coda, most of Karim Aïnouz’s film is set during the nineteen-fifties, in and around Rio de Janeiro. We first meet Guida and Eurídice as teen-agers, and watch them hanging out together—lounging in their bedrooms, wearing slips because of the heat, and chatting about sex. Guida eats an orange, messily, while she talks. Eurídice is the more timid of the two; her passion is reserved for the piano, and she plans to study at the Vienna Conservatory. Yet it’s Guida who departs, running away to sea with a Greek sailor, on a nocturnal whim, and leaving no more than a dropped earring to remember her by.
If “Invisible Life” is a better film than “Bombshell,” it’s largely because Aïnouz, unlike Roach, finds room for the ephemera that clutter even the most dramatic episodes. When Guida comes home alone, without her sailor but great with child, she is greeted with fury by her father, who disowns her, while her mother cowers in the background. “If I leave this house, you will never see me again,” Guida exclaims. That sounds like a burst of high melodrama, but, after she’s gone, we linger, and watch her parents resume their everyday tasks. Her father, knife in hand, scrapes scales from a fish, and her mother takes down washing from the line. You sense a kind of shell-shocked ordinariness; the very air seems to quiver. Everything looks the same, yet everything has changed.
From here on, although plenty happens, the thing that you desperately want to happen—that is, for the sisters to be reunited and made whole—keeps not coming to pass. Each of them believes, mistakenly, that the other is in Europe, and letters between them never reach their destination. At one agonizing moment, the two of them visit the same restaurant, in Rio, but Eurídice stays in the bathroom too long, and the chance is missed. Endlessly longed for but unglimpsed, she is all too true to her name.
“Invisible Life” is a heady blend of the casual, the sorrowful, the near-mythical, and the carnally explicit—never more so, be warned, than on Eurídice’s wedding night. She marries, or is married off to, a local dullard, and, if you’re aghast at her decision, you don’t know much about the rule of family law in conservative Catholic societies. The virgin bride gets drunk, throws up, and, at her first sight of an erection, lets out a yelp of horrified laughter. Fair enough. But the comedy dies as her new husband foists himself upon her, in the tub and then on the bathroom floor. The expression on her face is one of hurt, alarm, and, most grievous of all, resignation; this, she realizes, is how things are going to be. Kayla’s holy terror, in “Bombshell,” as Ailes stakes his sweaty claim, may be devastating, but the violation of Eurídice is worse, not least because, though a nightmare, it isn’t yet a crime. Marital rape did not become a criminal offense in Brazil until 2005. The world moves on, but not as fast as we think. ♦
