There’s no place for a hagiography in the current landscape. Our heroes fall on a regular basis, and villains rule the world. With our debates bathed in extremes, and everyone being forced to pick a side, it’s an ideal time for nuanced, balanced storytelling that brings out more than one — if not all — sides of a person, place or philosophy.
If we accept this basic fact, then The Loudest Voice is what you would call an anti-hagiography; a hit job on Roger Ailes, who single-handedly changed the way news came to be consumed by the USA and, indeed, the rest of the world.
Now Ailes, as testimonies and documents would tell you, was a despicable man. He twisted facts to make news more than an information-spreading tool, encouraged hate among conservative Americans, and was a sexual deviant who misused his power to subjugate women. When billionaire Rupert Murdoch decided to branch into the cable news TV business, he put Ailes in charge, and the newly-formed Fox News soon turned into a force to reckon with. The limited series consists of five episode, each one named after the year it’s set in, with the show covering the time period from 1995 to 2017.
Ailes may be worst kind of human being, but creators Tom McCarthy and Alex Metcalf never go beyond moulding a token villain. He possesses the vileness of, say, a Frank Underwood, but the latter was a fictional figure we yearned to see push boundaries of villainy each time he turned up on screen. Watching The Loudest Voice reminded me of House Of Saddam, HBO’s exceptional miniseries about Saddam Hussein, which operated within a similar framework of time jumps across episodes. Hussein was presented as a tyrant, a ruthless dictator and ruler, but by the end of the show you began to get a deeper understanding of the man and his motivations (the show is currently streaming on Hotstar; check it out).
The Loudest Voice possesses no such quality. There’s a small reference made to how Ailes suffered from haemophilia from a young age; the doctors predicted he wouldn’t live beyond his teen years but his father refused to treat him with kid gloves, turning him into the thick-skinned man he eventually became. Such insights are absent for most part.
What further compounds the unidimensional nature of Ailes’ portrayal is Russell Crowe, who delivers an excessively self-conscious performance, with little help from a make-up crew that turns him into a heightened version of Crowe himself, and not Ailes. Unlike last year’s Vice — another jab at the Republican government, centred around the life of Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld‘ — where Christian Bale made you forget the presence of any ‘acting’, Crowe’s performance focusses on theatrics, and rarely on any human facets of the character.
The more fascinating aspect of the show is the creation and growth of a news service that went on to permeate the consciousness of Americans, especially in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and how the media turned into a tool for the government to spread propaganda. Several parallels can be drawn with a certain news editor of an Indian news network that has turned into a propaganda machine for the current government, and there are smart analogies drawn to dissect the reason for Donald Trump’s ascent to post of President. But eventually, The Loudest Voice falls prey to the same one-sided philosophy its meant to criticise. Like with hagiographies, it’s a show that’s best enjoyed with a pinch of salt.
The Loudest Voice is now streaming on Hotstar.
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