‘Bombshell' takes aim at Fox News, hits its target

Love her or loathe her, most Americans would agree that Megyn Kelly has one of the best voices in the TV news business. An appealing combination of silky and slightly hoarse, it's instantly recognizable. And it's one of Kelly's chief identifiers that Charlize Theron completely nails in “Bombshell,” an absorbing, well-crafted chronicle of the sexual harassment accusations that forced Fox News founding CEO Roger Ailes to resign in disgrace.

We hear Theron-as-Kelly before we see her in “Bombshell,” in which she acts as tour guide, institutional memory and sardonic critic of Fox News, where she worked for 13 years as part of a mission to correct a perceived liberal drift in TV journalism. (“The news is like a ship. Take your hands off the wheel and it pulls left,” says Ailes, played here by a jowly, heavily padded John Lithgow.)

When Kelly appears on screen, it's clear that Theron has fully inhabited a character who, by the end of a welter of events that will include the campaign and election of Donald Trump, the implosion of one of the most powerful men in media and the beginnings of the #MeToo movement, still remains something of a cipher. But even without particularly penetrating insights into her inner drive and motivations, “Bombshell” is notable, if only, as Theron described the film at a screening in Washington, D.C., last month, as the “origin story of where we find ourselves right now.”

That story is bracing and dispiriting, inspiring and deeply icky. Unfolding over several months in 2015 and 2016, “Bombshell” tells three parallel stories that are fascinating mostly because of the ways they pointedly fail to intersect. While Kelly endures the fallout from challenging Trump about his sexist remarks during the first Republican primary debate in 2015, another Fox anchor, Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman), is suffering her own indignity at the hands of their misogynistic boss and erstwhile mentor.

Directed by Jay Roach (“Recount,” “Game Change”) from a script by Charles Randolph (“The Big Short”), “Bombshell” is crisp, lucid and pacey, not just when it's revisiting Kelly's showdown with Trump and Carlson's sexual harassment suit against Ailes, but when it's describing the Fox News formula to captivate older viewers: “frighten-titillate, frighten-titillate.” A scene in the women's dressing room - where a bevy of mostly blonde newscasters choose among a regimented array of form-fitting sheath dresses and spike-heeled shoes - plays less like something out of “Broadcast News” than “The Stepford Wives.”

In that origin story of where we find ourselves right now, Kelly, Carlson and their colleagues would surely be portrayed with far more complexity - brave, perhaps even heroic but also complicit. For its part, “Bombshell” tells a crucial chapter of that larger tale with coolheaded style and heated indignation. Its aim might be narrow, but it hits the target.