‘Tis the season to be mindful of whistleblowers standing up to institutions with secrets to hide. A few weeks after a still-anonymous insider reported White House phone calls that have now led to articles of impeachment, three new movies are reviving Hollywood’s grand tradition of whistleblower cinema.
In the spirit of All the President’s Men (Watergate scandal), Serpico (police corruption), Silkwood (plutonium contamination), The Insider (Big Tobacco cover-up), Erin Brockovich (pollution), and Spotlight (Catholic Church pedophilia), these films salute real-life mavericks who risked reputation and livelihood to expose systemic wrongdoing. Bombshell (in wide release Friday) shows how Gretchen Carlson became the first woman at Fox News to publicly charge network boss Roger Ailes with sexual harassment. Dark Waters portrays one lawyer’s crusade to hold DuPont accountable for poisoning West Virginia drinking water with carcinogenic chemicals; and The Report dramatizes a congressional staffer’s obsessive quest to detail the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program.
While the American truth-teller archetype inspired an earlier golden age of fact-based thrillers in the ‘70s, big screen whistleblowers return to the fore this winter during an especially fraught time. Dark Waters cowriter and director Todd Haynes tells Fortune, “I’ve always loved whistleblower films about people who experience this very real sense of isolation when they stand up to corruption. All social justice movements really start with individual courage, and I think that idea crosses some of the partisan lines that we’re all mired in right now.”
In synch with the #MeToo movement, Bombshell refers to the 2016 blockbuster lawsuit filed by former Fox & Friends cohost Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) declaring that Fox News CEO Roger Ailes fired her for refusing to have sex with him. As depicted in the film, Ailes (John Lithgow), a master of the workplace quid pro quo, routinely promised female employees career advancement in exchange for sexual favors. Bombshell director Jay Roach notes that the company’s secretive corporate culture, enforced by nondisclosure agreements, enabled Ailes to prey on female employees with impunity.
“Roger Ailes may not have been an entirely successful cult leader, but I think he tried to get 100% loyalty from his employees. When you have men with narcissistic, borderline sociopathic tendencies, they develop systems where everyone has to display their allegiance. This story’s set at Fox, but it’s really about things that go on everywhere and I hope that makes Bombshell compelling as a dark cautionary tale about how badly things can go when you have this kind of toxic set-up in place.”
Source: From ‘Bombshell’ to ‘The Report,’ Whistleblower Cinema Is Back in a Big Way | Fortune