[6.2/10] *Bombshell* plays like a second rate Adam McKay film. It has the same direct addresses to the audience, the same straightforward explanation and table-setting for the situation at hand, and the same “period piece for the recent past” vibe of movies like *The Big Short* and *Vice*. But what it’s missing is the humor.
In theory, that shouldn’t be a big deal. Institutionalized sexual harassment, the subject of the film, isn’t a laughing matter. But part of what made the artifice of McKay’s more sober films work is that they approached the insane events they cover with a touch of absurdism, a touch of “Can you believe these people?”, that helps make the more contrived or didactic parts of the presentation go down smoother. Even star Margot Robbie’s turn in “I, Tonya” managed to balance the real, piercing emotional toll and topics at play with a certain awareness of the ridiculous.
*Bombshell*, on the other hand, is a deeply serious film, one that drowns in its own efforts to be an Important Film about Important Things™. It is as breathless as it is airless. So many moments of the film are laden with melodrama and monologues. Despite a vaguely cinema verite approach stylistically (give or take some odd, dramatic zooms), the film has a stagey quality to it, with most of its characters pausing to capital-A Act and deliver conspicuously curated points or exposition about whatever the issue at hand is. For a story about something so real and pernicious, *Bombshell* almost always feels like it’s holding its story at arm’s length.
Except in the rare instances where it doesn't. Director Jay Roach centers *Bombshell* around the stories of three women. Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron) has conspicuously pensive scenes and corny, dramatic pronouncements as the established anchor deciding whether or not to break ranks and publicly come out against her boss. Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) plays the crusading host, forced out due to sexism, with scores of exasperated close-ups and even direct appeals to the camera. Both cram complex stories into broadly familiar tropes.
But the film shakes off its more cartoonish impulses more often in the story of Kayla Pospisil (Margot Robbie), a young aspiring reporter who dreams of an on-air position and finds herself ensnared in her boss’s harassment to get there. It’s in this story and this story alone that *Bombshell* dials into something more real.
There’s genuine camaraderie and complexity to the relationship between Kayla and her secretly-liberal-and-lesbian best friend at Fox News, Jess Carr (Kate McKinnon, who all but steals the show), as both balance legitimate empathy with the need for self-preservation. Robbie plays the shock and hardship of her position with piercing truth. And in the scene where the film depicts Kayla’s harassment is also its realest, scariest, and most uncomfortable. That sequence, where Kayla is forced to submit to her bossess’s perverse, powerplay whims, feels gross and and frighteningly true in a way so little of the rest of the film does.
Part of that comes down to the performances. The cast is star studded, with even the bit parts fulfilled by a who’s who of outstanding character actors. But since most portray real life individuals, their turns are often reduced to impressions or exaggerations. And even those that don’t have the cheesiness of speechifying and Oscar reel oratories with the players making very obvious and loud acting choices that takes the punch out of whatever true emotion they’re trying to convey.
The exceptions mostly come down to Robbie (who still suffers from some of the film’s monologism), McKinnon, and strangely enough, John Lithgow as the odious Fox News impresario Roger Ailes. If there’s any character in this film liable to come off so over-the-top that he almost floats away, it’s Ailes -- the paranoid, perverted, power-grabbing news gremlin who’s made so many of these women’s lives a living hell. But Lithgow, acting under an impressive set of prosthetics, somehow manages to make this man as bombastic and repulsive as he ought to be, while also making him seem like a real human being with his own self-justifying delusions and terrifying impulses. The film’s most dramatic villain is, strangely, also one of it’s most lived in performances.
But every actor in the film has to overcome the script. Eventually the film coalesces around decisions among its three main characters over whether to come forward about Ailes’s harassment. But until that point, it stumbles around as a series of vignettes organized around a theme more than any sort of unified narrative. Meanwhile, the film is trying to explicate that theme with overtly didactic dialogue, grand speeches about What This All Means, and lingering shots of the characters’ daughters that all but scream “Won’t somebody please think of the children?!” at the audience.
The film’s message -- about workplace harassment and the institutional rot that preserves it -- is a noble one, but also one lost in those choices. As a dramatized piece of quasi-journalism, it lacks punch to anyone who’s read even the barest of headlines about this situation over the past five years. As an effort to persuade, it suffers from the fact that 95% of people liable to even see the film most likely already agree with its points. As an effort to preserve this moment and this fight for history, it falters by only glancingly grappling with the bile that personalities like Kelly and Carlson spewed on a regular basis before joining this crusade.
With that, *Bombshell* feels like a high class T.V. movie, one that hopes it can wow you with its over-the-top presentation, celebrity performances of known personalities, and nod-worthy arguments. Occasionally, it grazes profundity and drills down into something real. But for the most part, it holds the audience’s hand through every theme, performance, and emotion in the piece, with a dour realism that belies its clearly dramatized presentation of these events.
There’s few laughs, if any, to be had about powerful creeps wrecking the lives of the women beneath them. But when *Bombshell* adopts the McKay approach in telling this story, it misses that key ingredient which makes the more constructed elements of McKay’s movies work without eliciting eye-rolls. Without it, Roach’s attempt at the same without that wry lens comes off more like an on-the-nose, visual essay so scared that its audience won’t understand its blaring ideas and argument that it practically has characters announce them, and misses the core tragedy and realness of what its subjects suffered in the process.
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