Nosh 180: 'Bombshell,' 'Uncut Gems' & More

David Elliott

         

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.

APPETIZER (Reviews of Bombshell and Uncut Gems)                    
 

Bombshell
Last week, the March sisters in Little Women. This week, the Fox sisters of Bombshell. That is, Fox News prime star Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron), slightly lesser star Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman), and a young composite figure, the rising Fox vamp Kayla (Margot Robbie). Feral king of the Fox den is Roger Ailes (John Lithgow), founding brain of the cable news hatchery that gradually buried the Republican Party’s moral compass and helps Donald Trump torture the nation. Ailes, who began by manipulating media for Nixon, is the only important male figure in the film. The others are just nice suits and worried brows: Kevin Dorff as blustering Bill O’Reilly, Richard Kind as Ailes lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and Malcolm McDowell as mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Tracing the scandal by which Kelly, Carlson and other angry women overthrew Ailes in a bilious cloud of muck, by exposing sexual predation when they were budding at Fox, Jay Roach’s film often has a hot-cable pulse of breathless, breaking news. It peepholes into network offices and private shames, achieving an authentic aroma of  nausea. Theron’s Kelly, with the most to lose, seeks for a while to stay on board, even after Trump trashes her in his tweet stream. Kidman’s Carlson is the gutsy risk-taker, craving payback (Kidman must have recalled her young role as a local TV news wow in Gus Van Sant’s To Die For). The new dazzler is Robbie, fresh from her luminous Sharon Tate in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. As composite Kayla she gets a queasy turn on Roger’s meat rack. Robbie has the old Harlow and Monroe ability to be vampy without irony (though they winked it more). Kayla’s ambitious evasion of truth cracks once the rumor dirt becomes a legal mudslide and Ailes is fired. No doubt the writers loved giving her a sexy sleepover with the newsroom’s covert lesbian, a Clinton fan.

Bombshell radiates feminist heat. Still, a magnetic villain can take charge, and Lithgow’s Ailes is almost medieval in decay, his huge gut bulging above his walker. He calls himself  “grotesque” and “Jabba the Hutt,” but the ancient Nixonian still wants the pop of making beautiful women squirm and squish for a major TV job. Secretly branding them career sluts, as if by droit de seigneur, brought Ailes a a satisfaction clearly beyond the sexual (never has old, icky arousal seemed quite so dreary). Later the creep feels betrayed and snaps “Glad I’m not in a foxhole with you!,” unaware that his sordid fake-news career is the real Fox hole. The movie gives little attention to the Fox mutation of news, to please its tranced base with a daily dose of dimwit. Ailes is dead and O’Reilly bloviates from a lesser perch, yet the carnival of abuse, of news and women, continues (and Fox is not the only provider). The get-lost  checks given to the fallen men still dwarf the settlement money won by the women.

Uncut Gems

Unusual opening: from a hellish Ethiopian mine shaft, then (zip) into the colonoscopy probe of Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler). Despite that double dive, Uncut Gems is not deep. However vile, almost everything has the lurid surface wow of Darius Khondji’s imagery, which takes its cue from a big gem. This movie is so hooked on night glitz and vulgar  bling that natural light dies on contact. Ratner is a sports-mad gambling addict, deep in hock. He risks losing his small biz in Manhattan’s 47^th Street diamond district after he illegally imports a raw, massive “black opal” found in that African mine. It’s his collateral to inflate his bets, con an auction house, and offend tough in-law Arno (Eric Bogosian), a macher who calls in his marker by having ugly thugs terrorize Howard. To further cook the madness, Howard loans the exotic gem to his chief client among the sports-bet crowd, Kevin Garnett of Boston Celtics fame (a presence so lofty that he hardly needs to act).

Uncut Gems is pulpy and not PC. Garnett suddenly sees the glitz-stone as his unique, Afro-roots charm, a fairly primitive plot device. Ratner and his squalling family – wife Idina Menzel steams with rage because Howard has a love-hutch mistress (appealing Julia Fox) – is a cliché clot of downscale Jewish stereotypes. F-bombs are heard at every possible opportunity. There is a memorably bad Passover seder, and about equal piety for Howard’s threatened goldfish. Martin Scorsese was a producer, and though brotherly auteurs Benny and Josh Safdie were raised near the diamond zone, and certainly have every right to crop their turf, they flaunt their debts to Mean Streets and Goodfellas. After such riots of excess as Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street, De Palma’s Bonfire of the Vanities, Verhoeven’s Showgirls and Aronofsky’s Mother!, why are these 135 minutes of raucous, slumming slam-bam being hailed as bravura?

Because Sandler, showing age marks and a saggy pot, and given many close-ups of sweaty desperation, has left his safety nook as a nice, shallow comedian for (oy vey) Howard Ratner. He achieves some effective sizzles of freak-out and takes real punishment (photo above). But his pleas for pity have the familiar Sandler tone, the draggy vocal timing, the boy-man with infantile insides. In the Sanders fan hive, Oscar talk buzzes. He might get lucky, but I recommend three excellent performances involving keen ambition (two Jewish): young Renee Zellweger as a savvy Hasidic wife who enters the gems trade in A Price Above Rubies (1998); the late ace Robert Forster as an “ice” salesman who flips his game in Diamond Men (2000), and Richard Gere’s superb portrait of a Big Apple hustler hoping to work a mitzvah (good deed) in Norman (2016). The Academy ignored them.  

SALAD (A List)

Remarkable Women in Business

Hard-striving achievers, in order of arrival:
Joan Crawford as waitress turned restauranteur Mildred Pierce (1946 – ditto Kate Winslet’s Mildred, 2011); Jane Wyman as Texas store magnate Lucy Gallant (1955); Jo Van Fleet as bordello madam Kate Trask in East of Eden (1955); Faye Dunaway as star turned Pepsi diva Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest (1979); Maureen Stapleton as hotel owner Lillian Garber in Sweet Lorraine (1987); Melanie Griffith as secretary turned biz wiz in Working Girl (1988); Juliette Binoche as confectioner Vianne Rocher in Chocolat (2000); Queen Latifah as rising hairdresser Gina Norris in Beauty Shop (2005); Meryl Streep as bossy fashionista Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada (2006); Penélope Cruz as chef/manager Raimunda in Volver (2006); Amy Adams and Emily Blunt as the upward Lorkowski sisters in Sunshine Cleaning (2008); Audrey Tautou as couture/perfume genius Gabrielle Chanel in Coco Before Chanel (2009), and Jennifer Lawrence as canny inventor Joy Mangano in Joy.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

The most powerful biz-gals of classic Hollywood were gossip news queens Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, whom new arrival Welles slyly charmed until they ripped into Citizen Kane (to please W.R. Hearst). Welles’s pal Joseph Cotten added a touché, after Hopper ran an item linking him to girlish star Deanna Durbin. As Orson told Henry Jaglom much later, “Jo was a gentleman, which makes this story so good. He came up to Hopper at a party and said, ‘Hedda, if you say that again I’m going to kick you in the ass.’ She didn’t believe it. She kept talking about it, and he just came and kicked her in the ass. The last man in Hollywood you’d think would behave that way to a woman!” (From the Welles/Jaglom My Lunches With Orson. By the way, Jo Cotten did have a hot affair with Durbin.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Few European directors loved American Westerns quite like Wim Wenders: “Most Westerns measure lives in miles, and Ernst Wilhelm Wenders came 6,000 miles to make his modern, romantic ‘Western,’ Paris, Texas. Born three month after Hitler’s exit, he would embrace Americam films, songs, vistas, liberties, and led the ’70s German film revival with Werner Herzog and R.W. Fassbinder. His gorgeous art-noir The American Friend led to Hollywood, where Hammett became a studio mothball tired from nostalgia, not ‘the film I had gone to make.’ Some years later, Paris realized his dream on a much deeper level.” (From the Harry Dean Stanton/Paris, Texas chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A fine movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Though inevitably shadowed by Joan Crawford’s 1946 Oscar winner, Kate Winslet was a splendid Mildred in the lavish TV remake of Mildred Pierce (HBO/MGM 2011; director Todd Haynes, d.p. Ed Lachman).

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