Bombshell – #MeToo

This particular subject is already discussed on TV with series such as The Loudest Voice, The Good Fight or The Morning Show and in the taiwanese film Nina Wu.After Weinstein and the #MeToo mouvment, Bombshell is the first hollywood movie to portray the controversies of sexual harassment in the media.

Based on true events, Jay Roach’s film tells the smash of Fox News founder Roger Ailes and several accounts of sexual harassment that resulted in his resignation in 2016, after twenty years ahead of the american news channel. Roger Ailes was for TV what Harvey Weinstein was for cinema, a sexual predator who took advantage of his position in order to satisfy his urges.

The Loudest Voice dared to take Ailes’s point of view and dig in the foundations of Fox News, to paint his rise to power up to his fall and his death in 2017. Lead by a prestigious casting : Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron, Margot Robbie… Bombshell choosed fox journalists’s vision. Addressing the complexity of each of them without presenting women only as victims.

Nicole Kidman (Gretchen Carson) plays a courageous mother who, after being fired, confronts the network in a very expansive trial, Charlize Theron (Megyn Kelly, the channel’s star) proves to be a more ambiguous character, reluctant to report what she underwent while navigating through the newsroom. Whereas Margot Robbie is the only one to play a fictional character, a talented and candid woman who will discover rapidly the « behind the scenes of loyalty » in a disturbing scene with Roger Ailes’s (John Lithgow) libidinous gaze. Opposing them are Roger’s wife, his secretary and the majority of the newsroom who choses to be silent regarding his behavior.

Bombshell portays with decency a man’s and a system’s monstrosity and offers a few eccentricities… Especially when Charlize Theron explains to the spectator Fox News’s matrix. Reminding finance movies such as The Big Short – the screenwriter Charles Randolph worked in these two projects – or recently The Laundromat. Jay Roach, already a successful director of comedies (Austin Powers, Meet the parents…), gives a political tone to his movies since Recount (2008). This time, he dresses the portrayal of a private scandal that resulted in Ailes’s fall and Fox News’s media manipulation behind Trump’s presidential campaign.