A Lionsgate Picture, Written by Charles Randolph, Directed by Jay Roach.
Charlize Theron is often misunderstood by people who just see her beauty, but she is one of the most transformative and talented actresses in recent memory. Here she completely becomes Megyn Kelly, both in her appearance and her performance, and she is totally deserving of her Oscar nomination.
The rest of the ensemble is very strong, one of the best of the year, led among others by top performances from Nicole Kidman and a menacing John Lithgow. Rob Delaney, Kate McKinnon, Liv Hewson, and many others also deliver strong turns.
The film certainly isn’t perfect, with a strange tonal balance that mainly wants to be a drama, but features certain scenes that seem awkwardly embedded to make this seem like “the new Big Short”. There are many moral issues related to people who worked at Fox News and the agenda’s they pushed, and a more in depth examination of this would’ve made for a more morally complicated and sophisticated film.
An interesting and mostly unexplored sub plot features Robbie’s young, conservative, “Jesus loving instagram influencer” and her hidden sexual relationship with Kate McKinnon, a fellow worker at Fox who is a closeted Lesbian, Democrat, torn between work and personal life. The two have amazing chemistry and I wish the relationship could’ve had more focus, and the unusual, powerful, and complicated situation these two opposites had together could’ve been more fleshed out.
The two stand out scenes of the film belong to the stand out star, and that is Margot Robbie. The first I want to highlight is the scene that likely got her Oscar nominated, a phone call she has with McKinnon towards the end of the film. Robbie’s character finally breaks down and admits the harassment she suffered at the hands of Ailes, and it is a remarkable and heartbreaking scene.
However, the stand out moment for me was earlier in the film, and it was one of the most harrowing and uncomfortable scenes I have witnessed in a long time. Robbie’s character Kayla enters the office of Roger Ailes hoping to get an opportunity to be on air. However, she is quickly made to stand up and “twirl” and then he assertively asks her to lift her skirt so he can see her legs, and makes her lift it high enough that she totally exposes her underwear, until he is finished and allows her to sit back down.
It is horrible to sit through and witness, made even more heartbreaking by the fact that you can see fully on Robbie’s face that the naive young girl who entered the room is gone, and a much more damaged and totally changed person is leaving that room. It is Robbie that makes this scene what it is, and for this alone she sells the whole film better than anything else, and shows the horrors many women go through. She deserves to be an Oscar winner this year.
While it isn’t the perfect film, it is an important topic, and features some stunning performances. This isn’t the story of Fox News, it is the story of what life has been like for women for centuries, and it’s something that needs to be continually highlighted until true progress is made.
Rating = 3.5/5
Howe's World of Film and TV 