The #MeToo movement started blowing up sometime 3 years ago, when executive producer Harvey Weinstein received backlash from many women in the film industry who had been sexually abused and raped by the man. The allegations against Weinstein were so strong it created an epidemic (or better yet, a trend) so massive it has spread across the globe, allowing women to stand up, feel empowered through empathy and utter the words “me too” right out of their mouths. Since then, Hollywood has become more careful and more understanding of women’s rights; now, women are being placed on a lofty pedestal in the hopes of possibly rewriting the framework of our society, where “men act like men” and “women did it upon themselves.” With the rise of this movement comes one of the many closed borders opening before our eyes: people are now made aware of what’s going on in our society; laws and policies in certain workplaces (including the government) are being updated; and — arguably the most important — conversations are starting to spring up left and right.
I’m pretty sure Bombshell — another one of Jay Roach’s deliberate attempts to bait Hollywood into liking his political satires about the government (or possibly anything juicy or interesting he gets his hands on) — is making strides at every theater with its ingemination of the events circulating Fox News mogul Roger Ailes who pulled off a Harvey Weinstein (or maybe it should be the other way around, since Ailes probably did it first. Or maybe it doesn’t matter at this point since both of them are sexual predators anyway) on his female employees for the promise of security. And you may think to yourself for a second, “does this really happen?” Well, it does. It does happen. And if a film as sensationalized and as condescending as Bombshell serves as your only pool of knowledge in understanding how much of an imperative the #MeToo movement truly is, then you better sift through all the superfluous and extraneous threads that Roach and his partner-in-crime Charles Randolph — the same man behind The Big Short and Love and Other Drugs — have left unstitched and out in the open.
“Based on a real scandal,” Bombshell focuses its attention on three blonde Barbies — whose similarities in terms of physical characteristics and decision-making outweigh the differences, which is probably just their unique facial distinctions — as they stand up against the sexual pandering of their boss: Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman with a random blonde wig probably retrieved by the hair-styling team at the last second), who has been put on the chopping block for refusing to be made a total mockery of by his testosterone-heavy co-anchors; Megyn Kelly (a makeup-heavy, low-toned Charlize Theron), who has taken advantage of the privileges she’s had as a superpower among her fellow news anchors and has been made to pay the price of her past decisions; and Kayla Pospisil (Margot Robbie as a cookie cutter blonde chick), who has been the most recent victim of Ailes’ (John Lithgow) power play considering her hopes and dreams of being one of Fox’s newscasters. When the first among the three has started to make a move against the masculine predators who roam around the hallways of the news building, the tension starts to escalate into an all-out war between Ailes with his sturdy legion of loyalists ready to back him up and Carlson with her group of lawyers ready to fire on all cylinders. For Carlson’s intentions of putting the man down to fully materialize, she needs backup from other women in the news team who will be willing to take a step forward and say that they too have been abused, that they too have had to suffer a great ordeal of keeping their stories in the dark, waiting for the sunlight to notice them so they can be revealed to the world.
The film — as any other film might have — bears the noble intention of exhibiting this outright display of misogyny and harassment in the workplace as experienced by women regardless of the circumstances. The political aspect of the film is made to be on-the-nose and shoved down every person’s throat to make sure that the crux of the matter can be spread across its audience, especially the ones who have remained ignorant and unaware about the goings-on in our merry society. The film wants people to be more angry, more pissed off and more displeased at the rotten systems continuously pervading our society, dividing us from each other, refusing to help our collective unconscious thrive and grow. But more than being angry, the film wants to obviously be a voice for those people, including Carlson, Kelly and Pospisil, who have always been voiceless, that this way, they may finally be free… or at least, that’s what the producers had intended the film to be.
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As the superficial layer of the film starts getting peeled off more and more, the film ends up becoming the hollow vessel it has always been, using the Fox News scoop years ago to commodify the nature of the cause by framing all of the characters in a one-dimensional box waiting to be crushed flat by the actual gravity of the subject matter being tackled. The blondes, supposed to bring life to the film, end up being the actual subject of controversy, as they try to wrangle attention from every viewer by unknowingly trying to outperform each other in this pageantry of ad misericordiam. None of their characters have anything substantial to offer in terms of how women perceive their given situations; instead, they move like dolls waiting for their cues to come in and show off their excessively theatrical acting that feels unnecessary when a film full of good intentions aims for authenticity.
Not that it matters at this point, but Bombshell could’ve been a more unflinching, more nail-biting display of the hypocrisy of journalism (a feat Richard Jewell was able to capture well through the likes of Olivia Wilde) and media outlets, how the Fox News building is the thunderdome for media hopefuls like composite character Kayla who wants nothing but the best for her career. A lot of the themes the film tried to tackle — media sensationalism, office politics, blind fanaticism — are left sitting in a pot of water without the stove ever being turned on. But no. Instead, the film limits itself to the corners of the story it is based on; and in effect, forgoing all possible aspects that have been brought up that could’ve been observed, analyzed and, if possible, even critiqued.
If anything, Roger Ailes — the man who exists in the narrative to wreak havoc to the lives of every woman in Fox News — is the most believable of them all. Lithgow brings life to the dead Fox News chief who relishes in toxic masculinity and self-entitlement by giving the audience a dose of how bad of a person he is and how he has managed to get away from all of the sins he has committed against the women in the building. We are made to realize how big of a dick he is (pun not intended) by having the mentality that people, women to be more specific, should be more grateful to him for he gave them employment and the opportunity to eat possibly more than three times a day with all the perks and benefits he gifted them after fulfilling his dirty fantasies.
Bombshell is a pivotal film that allows Jay Roach and Charles Randolph to be exposed for the rabble-rousers that they are. It’s easy to create a film that thinks of itself as important and relevant to our society where everything is now being put into question; but the idea of actually doing it and acting as though what they have made is “important” and “relevant” is no less than the ubiquitous condescending man in our office who acts like he knows everything in the office simply because of his tenure or — for a better way to express the idea — a person hailing from the depths of the boomer generation who has done nothing but to tell a story about everything being better during their time. The cognitive dissonance that exists in the totality of the film is a bigger crime in itself than making a film about the Fox News scandal. The explosion in Bombshell will diffuse so quickly you wouldn’t realize that by the time it’s over, nothing has ever truly detonated.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rBnkBIhoFE]
Produced by Lionsgate Pictures, Bombshell is now screening in Philippine cinemas nationwide.
