The silence around sexual harassment in the media was so deafening that the breaking of it has to be equally noisy and explosive. And so it has been with a veritable flood of stories, from the TV series, Showtime’s The Loudest Voice on the Roger Ailes scandal, to The Morning Show, Apple TV”s streaming show loosely inspired by Matt Lauer’s decline and fall. But Jay Roach’s Bombshell has the biggest star cast yet.
Starring Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly, President Donald Trump’s favourite whipping girl during the 2016 election, Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson, the Fox News anchor and former Miss America who stood up against Ailes’ bullying in 2016, even before the #MeToo movement, and John Lithgow as Ailes.
Bombshell goes over the same ground as The Loudest Voice but with the focus firmly on Theron, who has a moral dilemma: should she stand with the sisterhood and speak up when her career is going so splendidly or stay silent about the culture of coercion. The performances by the stellar cast are spot-on though clearly Lithgow’s Ailes is less monster and more teddy bear gone rogue.
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In Margot Robbie’s fictional Kayla, the movie telescopes the experiences of several women on Fox News who had to undergo all manner of indignities to get ahead–from servicing Ailes sexually to ensuring they always dressed in a manner that showed off their legs to the audience to enduring loaded banter from male colleagues. Bombshell does a great job of showing the part Fox News has played in the coarsening of the debate in America, focusing on “stories that scare my grandmother and piss off my grandfather”, as one character puts it.
Sometimes women become the greatest enablers of sexual and psychological violence against other women. Bombshell shows how that can happen, with Ailes’ wife and secretary knowing exactly what he is doing to a series of young women but pretending ignorance. Ditto with the Murdochs, with Rupert Murdoch being played spectacularly by Malcolm McDowell in the end. As Kidman’s character, Carlson says at one point in the movie: “Someone has to speak up. Someone has to get angry.” Indeed Bombshell shows exactly what happens when women lead the charge.