Bombshell (2019)

Jay Roach's Bombshell arrives with the grim determination of a picture that knows precisely what it is for. It recounts the women at Fox News who toppled Roger Ailes, and it does so with the conviction of a public service announcement that happens to have a budget. The female ensemble is formidable and the anger is genuine. This is a #MeToo drama in its bones, built on solidarity among women and a righteous contempt for the men who ran the place, and it rarely lets that thesis out of its sight.

Kate McKinnon's closeted producer supplies the most interesting angle, a woman hiding her relationship inside an institution that would devour her for it, and her bond with Margot Robbie's composite character carries real weight. The casting leans on a female ensemble, though the faces remain almost uniformly white. The film has no interest in race, and its silence on the matter is loud. No environmental concerns cross the screen. Nobody wrestles with body image in any affirming register. Nobody is coded as neurodivergent. These absences are not oversights so much as the narrowness of the project.

The screenplay sands down its protagonists until they gleam, softening Megyn Kelly's racial commentary and Gretchen Carlson's homophobia so the audience can root without discomfort. That is a quiet act of revision. The film lands a few blows against corporate media, noting with some venom that accused men walked away with tens of millions while their accusers received settlements and silence. But the target is hypocrisy, not the system itself. And the message arrives with a mallet, repeated until even the sympathetic viewer checks the time. Well acted. Well meaning. Exhausting.