The Loudest Voice

It all seems so ridiculous until you remember we lived through it. At times, “Loudest Voice” plays like a white collar version of “The Sopranos,” as when Ailes orders his PR guy and fixer Brian Smith (Seth MacFarlane, “The Orville”) to take care of a leaker. Crowe, covered in mostly great prosthetics and looking as if he is wearing a fat suit that ate another fat suit, wheezes with every waddle and authentically underplays a human volcano.

It’s a pungent profile of a nauseating figure. ... “The Loudest Voice” sees the behind-the-scenes culture of sexual assault and the onscreen show of Barnum-ized reactionaryism as two curves of the same lens, which is trained on America and not necessarily opposed to airing anything, especially if it did strong numbers in the demo.

Thanks to a brisk pace, straightforward storytelling and a terrific central performance by Russell Crowe, “The Loudest Voice” builds up considerable steam, even when we know what’s coming.

Crowe disappears into Ailes and tries to offer some insight into what shaped him. It’s a tour-de-force, Emmy bait performance for sure. Yet Ailes remains repugnant and fairly one-dimensional.

A compelling if flawed condensation of Gabriel Sherman's book, worth watching for anyone interested in the political-media nexus where Ailes reigned.

A premiere scripted by Spotlight writer-director Tom McCarthy (also an executive producer) sets a talky, thoughtful tone for a saga that needs no embellishment. ... Crowe, a world-class bellower, only occasionally flips the switch from whispery, methodical creepiness to full-on scenery chomping. The result is an elegant mix of character study, workplace drama and political thriller.

The Loudest Voice blends West Wing-style operatics with a darker narrative about power most corrupting those who were already corrupt, and if it lacks Sorkin’s gift for whip-crack pacing, its excellent cast and dependable focus on the machinations of backroom deals keeps it fleet and engaging.

The result is a slick, well-made, engrossing, at times borderline pulp biopic, highlighted by a ferocious, screen-filling and appropriately theatrical performance by a nearly unrecognizable Russell Crowe, who all but disappears under the makeup and prosthetics and padding as the conniving, scheming, duplicitous, combative and intimidating Ailes.

Every moment of catharsis you might feel while watching The Loudest Voice comes with a massive caveat. If you consider the battle over and won, then the loudest voice in the room will keep echoing from well beyond the grave.

The series begins as full-steam-ahead entertainment, an Aaron Sorkin–ish explication of history, in which the past plays out with the buzzwords of the future. ... It’s packaged as a biopic and not some larger condemnation of “our times.” As I watched it, I kept wondering if something so relatively understated that aspires—unlike Ailes—to come across as relatively unbiased was too subtle for the world that Ailes created.

Ailes’ now-infamous skulduggery may have irrevocably damaged political discourse, but recounting it all makes for a wildly entertaining, occasionally painful, deep dive into the history of Fox News Channel and an excavation of one of the ways the current polarized American political climate came to exist.

As portrayed with ferocious bluster by Russell Crowe in an astonishing makeup transformation rivaling Christian Bale's in Vice, Ailes is shown to be a cunning glutton for power and control. ... Compelling adaptation. [24 Jun - 7 Jul 2019, p.11]

Oddly enough given the title, “The Loudest Voice” starts to feel less revealing and more salacious when it abandons nuance for loud noises. Not only is Crowe’s work more affecting during the all-too-brief moments studying Ailes’ origins, psyche, and internal motivations, but the show is, as well.

Crowe is excellent as Ailes; the actor all but disappears inside his synthetic girth, and he toggles effectively between Ailes’ avuncular charm and apoplectic rage. ... After three episodes, I found myself wishing the show had approached Ailes’ story from a different perspective, one that might offer fresh insight — Carlson’s, perhaps, or better yet, that of the mysterious gatekeeper Laterza. But The Loudest Voice isn’t really interested in learning anything from Ailes’ history — it’s simply content to repeat it.

"Voice" is an entertaining and very well-crafted piece of television that is just a little too predictable to be transcendent.

The seven-episode miniseries, four episodes of which were made available to critics, is steadily entertaining, as it tracks Ailes from 1995 to the end of his life in 2017. ... But “The Loudest Voice” becomes a simplistic and obvious anatomy of Fox News. Too much of the dialogue in the script, whose writers include “Spotlight” director Tom McCarthy, doubles as fuel on the fire, with little dramatic purpose.

As someone who is interested in how the xenophobic sausage is made, "The Loudest Voice" held my attention, but its bland approach can be more frustrating than it is fascinating.

Crowe is good to a point, but "The Loudest Voice" can be root canal.

The Loudest Voice seems more intent on probing the political and sociological impact of Fox News than the ferociously complicated psychology of the man who created it. It’s a worthy mission, but it leaves the character at the center of the series at something of a distance.

[The Loudest Voice] is so focused on the who, what, when, and where of that story that it neglects to dig sufficiently into the why and how. The Loudest Voice is most interested in the surface of things ... Crowe certainly tackles the part with zeal and shows us sides of the man — including his occasional gentleness and his wiseass sense of humor — that make him something more complicated than a Republican villain. ... He does have to engage in another kind of battle, one between himself and the prosthetics applied to his face to make it appear more jowly.

If the idea is to glean lessons and drama from Ailes’ story, The Loudest Voice is a bust. If the idea is to eventually win Crowe an Emmy, however, consider this a fair and balanced success.

When it's specific and detailed, capturing the depth of Sherman's reporting, it's perceptive and entertaining. ... Less successful are the grandstanding beats where Ailes walks into a situation controlled by some thinly written snowflake duck and makes a big speech dominated by Fox News talking points and then everybody claps at his insight and magnetism. Those are clunky and on-the-nose.

Engrossing but flawed. ...“The Loudest Voice” feels as though it has come way too late or much too soon. As a piece of current contextual storytelling, it struggles to provide the thematic platform that would make it more than a stylized Wikipedia entry. As a hit job, it comes on too strong, given that its subject is dead and gone.

It cannot reconcile a well-honed expertise on the nuts and bolts of news with its rudimentary understanding of personality and behavior. Sketches of actual people have been inserted into an environment more realistic and detailed than they are, a contrast unflattering to Crowe’s floundering performance.

View Ailes' life as an exercise in personal and political villainy, if you will; but it's a fascinating one. The Loudest Voice is merely repellent.

That the script can’t find an angle in on the “why” of Ailes and thus keeps on stating, more forcefully each time, the “what” holds Crowe back yet more. Small moments — as when, say, he tells his son about a moment of abuse in his childhood — come to feel like they must be “Rosebud” clues to crack the case of this Citizen Kane figure, if only because otherwise, his story has no dramatic energy, with endless indulgence replacing an arc.

The ploddingly paced, awkwardly constructed Showtime production manages to turn the spectacular rise and fall of former Fox News chief Roger Ailes into a slog that is as tiresome as it is tedious.

Unalloyed caricature of a political biography. ... Some filmmaker may one day undertake the story of Roger Ailes, Fox News, the rise of the modern Republican Party and the presidency of Donald Trump and make it a worthy enterprise. Something that can’t be said of this series, which has all the nuance of a long rap sheet plus indictment in its predictability, its driving effort to establish its case—and which, like those tummlers of old, can leave an audience longing for the end of the act.