Film review

  • Bombshell

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jay Roach (2019)

    The closing legends explain that those whose lawsuit brought down the Fox News CEO Roger Ailes in 2016 were the first group of women – ‘but not the last’ – to speak out against sexual harassment in the media.  Those behind Bombshell aren’t, however, the first film-makers to bring the events in question to the screen or even to dramatise them.  Alexis Bloom’s documentary Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes appeared in late 2018.  In mid-2019, the miniseries The Loudest Voice, in which Russell Crowe portrayed Ailes (and for which Crowe recently won a Golden Globe), aired on American television.  In Bombshell, Ailes (John Lithgow) is relegated to a supporting role.  The director Jay Roach (his previous feature was the mediocre Trumbo (2015)) and screenwriter Charles Randolph might claim they’re the first to tell the story from Ailes’s victims’ point of view yet the arch ‘but not the last’ aside is apt in a way the film presumably doesn’t intend.  It’s little more than two years since the #MeToo movement went viral but the subject of sexual abuse and harassment in the entertainment industry now feels familiar, to say the least.  In that sense, Roach and Randolph’s title is already a misnomer.

    This mightn’t be a problem if Bombshell were a penetrating drama but it’s a shallow piece of work that depends heavily on #MeToo momentum  to give itself some.  Charles Randolph (with Adam McKay) wrote The Big Short (2015); at the start of Bombshell, Randolph seems minded to use the Fox news anchor Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron) as a narrative guide-through-the-underworld similar to Ryan Gosling’s bond salesman in the earlier film.   Kelly’s narration is more or less abandoned, though, after her opening summary of Ailes’s contributions to the political success of a series of Republican presidents (Nixon, Reagan, Bush senior), and so on.  The Big Short was peppered with roguish explanations of financial jargon, both verbal and diagrammatic; there was plenty to read, as well as to watch, on screen.  The weak equivalent here is the succession of names of Fox News personnel that flash up whenever such characters make their first appearance in Bombshell.  In most cases, it’s also their last (and a fleeting) appearance.  Identifying these people seems like a means of obscuring the pointlessness of including them in the film at all.  (For non-American audiences, the names probably don’t mean much anyway.  I think Sean Hannity’s was the only one I recognised.)

    The title also means to evoke the alternative definition of ‘bombshell’:  that’s clear from the film’s theatrical release poster, dominated by the flawless faces and blonde hair of its three stars – Theron, Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie.  This aspect of the double meaning plays out curiously.  Bombshell’s Oscar nomination for make-up and hairstyling (by Kazu Hiro, Anne Morgan and Vivian Baker) is deserved but the movie’s parade of media women who, almost without exception, are perfectly groomed and coiffed is slightly unnerving.  It’s not just the presence of Kidman – who plays the Fox morning-show host Gretchen Carlson, the prime mover in suing Ailes – that brings The Stepford Wives to mind.  One gets the point that, in an industry shaped by the male gaze, having to look good is a career requirement for a woman that it isn’t for a man.  But I wasn’t sure how intentional it was that Charlize Theron’s Megyn Kelly, in particular, suggests a glazed automaton.

    Theron mostly speaks her lines with a determined, almost eerie calm.  This quietness (which, on the evidence of YouTube clips, exaggerates the composure of the real Kelly’s voice) is no doubt meant to give the impression – as Meryl Streep did so comically well in The Devil Wears Prada – of a successful woman who doesn’t need to raise her voice in order to be heard.  The narrative of Bombshell shows that such female self-confidence is wishful thinking.  Megyn Kelly comes to realise she needs to join forces with Carlson and other women, and speak up.  Even so, Theron’s persistently android quality makes Kelly an odd sort of victim-heroine-on-a-journey-of-enlightenment.  As the more variously ill-used Gretchen Carlson, Nicole Kidman is comparatively sympathetic and layered but somehow anxious too.  She seems always to be checking her performance.   An early shot of Carlson having a sandwich as she watches a television screen is a sign of things to come:  Kidman acts the act of eating.

    The men in Bombshell tend to be either shaggily unremarkable (Mark Duplass, as Kelly’s husband Douglas Brunt) or plausibly impersonal (Mark Moses as Fox co-president Bill Shine) or, in the more significant roles, physically grotesque.  Casting as Ailes an actor the audience is used to seeing play far from obnoxious characters sounds promising but John Lithgow is encased in so much prosthetic that he’s virtually disguised anyway.   (The real Ailes appears on archive footage during Megyn Kelly’s scene-setting introduction.)  Alex the Droog as Rupert Murdoch sounds even better and Malcolm McDowell doesn’t disappoint visually.  Those merciless blue eyes are unmistakable – besides, this is a case where imposing a real person’s looks on an actor with a very different facial structure pays dividends.  The deep furrows in Murdoch’s face, transplanted onto McDowell’s, not only create the look of a prizefighter who’s had a long career.  They thereby also serve to confirm the original’s moral brutality.  It’s a pity McDowell’s uncertain tone and accent are less impressive.

    Allison Janney, although, like Lithgow, she’s undercover in a wig and make-up, registers in the small role of Ailes’s lawyer Susan Estrich.  In spite of the relentless naming on screen of ‘real’ people who enter and exit in a matter of seconds, two of Bombshell‘s more important characters are inventions.  The sensational true story turns out not to have the dramatic chops it needs so Charles Randolph makes up people to represent Relevant Issues and help things along.  Kayla Pospisil (Margot Robbie) is an ambitious new hire at Fox, working with Carlson until she gets a job with news-show host Bill O’Reilly (Kevin Dorff), another serial harasser.  When he sacks her, Kayla gets drunk and sleeps with another member of O’Reilly’s team, Jess Carr (Kate McKinnon).

    The morning after, Kayla denies being gay.  Jess is both a closet lesbian and a closet Democrat, with Hillary Clinton posters on her bedroom wall.  (She’s working at Fox because she couldn’t get a job with a more politically congenial employer.)  When, a bit later, Kayla is getting called up to Ailes’s office to lift her skirts, she tells Jess, who says she can’t get involved.  Kayla too feels she needs to keep quiet for the sake of her career – until Megyn Kelly, now preparing to break her own silence, persuades her otherwise.  This subplot, though it bulks out the script, is largely schematic yet Margot Robbie lifts it.  With the freedom of not having to imitate a well-known real person, Robbie has more emotional energy than her co-stars but there’s more to her impact than that.  Her big, glamorous features seem to overpower Robbie’s thinly written character.  This almost chimes with Kayla’s symbolic function in the story – as a young woman struggling, in a man’s world, with the implications of her physical allure.

    Roger Ailes died in May 2017, a few months after Murdoch fired him.  By the time Ailes died, Bill O’Reilly’s media career had also sunk under the weight of sexual harassment lawsuits brought against him.  By the end of 2017, the Weinstein scandal had broken.  Bombshell celebrates a triumph of #MeToo action before the hashtag even existed but there’s a major evasion in the film’s closing implication that the tide has turned irrevocably against powerful men who, in word and/or deed, do women wrong.  Trump does appear on screen – in an interview, in which Megyn Kelly takes him to task for comments he’s made publicly about women.  (This is a splicing of actual and mock news footage – that is, the real Trump and Charlize Theron’s Kelly.)  Jay Roach seems to think this is enough to show what sort of creature Trump is but it’s not.  Bearing in mind the GOP’s traditional animal emblem (or even his political unorthodoxy), you might think of Trump as the elephant in the White House.  He’s certainly the elephant in the Bombshell room.

    21 January 2020

  • To Be or Not to Be (1942)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ernst Lubitsch (1942)

    In Trevor Griffiths’s play Comedians, Eddie Waters, the teacher of a stand-up comedy evening class, recalls touring with ENSA in Germany and visiting Buchenwald shortly after the end of the War – ‘They’d cleaned it up, it was like a museum’.  That same evening, Eddie fails to laugh at a Jewish gag in the ENSA show, having ‘discovered … there were no jokes left.  Every joke was a little pellet, a … final solution’.  He tells all this (and more) to Gethin Price, the comedic subversive in the night class.  Gethin drily replies that ‘A German joke is no laughing matter’.  Comedians was first staged in 1975 – about halfway in time between the release of Mel Brooks’s The Producers and the first series of the BBC sitcom ‘Allo ‘Allo!  Arguments still persist as to whether and, if so, how the Nazis can be a legitimate comic subject, as recently illustrated in the very different reactions to Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit.

    Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be stands out in the Nazi comedy canon because of when it was made.  Set in contemporary Warsaw, the film was released just a few weeks after Pearl Harbor and before the turning of the World War II tide.  Hollywood had been producing anti-Nazi dramas since before the outbreak of the war in Europe (Confessions of a Nazi Spy appeared in May 1939)  but what Carole Lombard’s biographer Larry Swindell terms ‘Nazified slapstick’ was more novel.  To Be or Not to Be wasn’t a popular hit and the critical response was mixed.  Even the individual response was mixed in the case of Manny Farber.  Reviewing Lubitsch’s film in March 1942, Farber described it as ‘mildly amusing’.  Six months later, he wrote that ‘With appalling thick-skin, the movie To Be or Not to Be facetiously thought that Nazi-dominated and cholera-ridden Poland was a world of laughs’.  It’s as if Farber took a little time to digest quite what he’d seen.

    The screenwriters Melchior Lengyel and Edwin Justus Mayer, Lubitsch (whose script contribution is uncredited) and Jack Benny, the male lead, were all Jewish; but they were also either American-born or, with the qualified exception of Lengyel[1], had emigrated to America before the Nazis came to power.  They were at a safe enough distance to stand accused of tasteless travesty of what the Germans were doing to Poland.  For a twenty-first-century audience, the setting and set-up are startling – so is some of the dialogue.  The plot involves the self-styled ‘great, great Polish actor’ Joseph Tura (Benny) having to impersonate a Gestapo colonel called Ehrhardt, known as ‘Concentration Camp Ehrhardt’, and to improvise his lines, which include ‘Yes, we do the concentrating, and the Poles do the camping’.  Present-day viewers can’t, even so, see To Be or Not to Be for what it originally was.  Reception of the film now is liable to be filtered through the experience of post-war Nazi comedies.  Manny Farber’s reactions remind you that in 1942 To Be or Not to Be was, whether or not you could find it funny, extraordinary.  I do find it funny but it seems only right to acknowledge how distance in time can lend enchantment to the view.

    This was the second time I’d watched the film.  The first (about fifteen years ago, since when I’ve also caught up with the 1983 remake[2]) was the only time I’d seen Carole Lombard prior to this month’s BFI retrospective of her work.  To Be or Not to Be was the only one of the four films I’ve watched her in this January that I’ve consistently enjoyed (excellent as My Man Godfrey is at the start).  This was her last picture (she died, aged thirty-three, in a plane crash the month before it opened); her role, in terms of screen time and good lines, is a supporting one; and perhaps her admirers don’t see it as quintessential Lombard.  I found her, as Joseph Tura’s glamorous wife Maria, much more supplied and modulated than in the other three pictures, and liked her better.  In most of her scenes, Lombard wears a satin gown (designed by Irene) that does seem typically her.

    Robert Stack is strikingly handsome and agreeable as the young Polish aircraft pilot who’s mad for Maria and makes his way to her dressing room each time Joseph embarks on Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy but the older men in the cast, playing either members of the Tura company or Nazi officers, are the heart of the film and Jack Benny is the star of the show.   Benny’s trademark mincing walk and effete deadpan as he pauses to deliver the title line are a fine complement to Joseph Tura’s histrionic zest in his exchanges with Maria and his impressions of Ehrhardt and the Polish traitor Siletsky.  (In his Hamlet wig, Benny wears an expression that anticipates Alec Guinness in one or two of his Kind Hearts and Coronets incarnations.)  He launches into ‘To be or not to be’ repeatedly but the repetition makes it increasingly funny, up to and including the final delivery.  (By now, the boots that Benny’s Hamlet wears over his tights are above thigh-high.)

    Making fun of the Nazis as if to disempower them was a controversial but comically inspired tactic.  At the start of proceedings, just before the German invasion of Poland, Tura and his troupe are rehearsing a play satirising the Gestapo.  The Polish government orders them to call off the production to avoid inflaming the political situation but the parts the actors have been preparing come in handy as the film’s plot thickens.  The company, dominated by hams, pretend to be Nazi officers.  The actual Nazis come across as ham actors too:  the exemplary highlight of this is a confrontation between the real Ehrhardt (Sig Ruman) and the actor Rawich (Lionel Atwill), a congenital milker of whatever he does on stage.  The supposed Hitler lookalike (Tom Dugan) is a company member called Bronski, the name of the protagonist played by Mel Brooks in the remake of To Be or Not to Be.

    Throughout the plot convolutions, Lubitsch always keeps you aware of the theatrical egotism and vanity that propel much of the action (and which is far more dynamic here than in Twentieth Century).  Using such an actual, ongoing matter-of-life-and-death situation to ensure narrative urgency may be in questionable taste but it’s effective:  it makes sense of the frequently manic playing.  Cutting from a scene of farce to an air raid on Warsaw sounds even harder to justify yet it’s possible to see the juxtaposition as a reminder from Lubitsch of the reality of the dire situation from which his remarkable comedy takes off .

    20 January 2020

    [1] The Hungarian Lengyel didn’t actually settle in America until 1937 but he’d spent time there (and in London) during the 1920s.

    [2] The remake is largely faithful to Lubitsch’s plot.  The main innovation in the Alan Johnson version, which is also its queasiest element, is the subplot involving the gay dresser.

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