Roger Ailes in Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes (Magnolia Pictures)

Genius. Monster. Visionary. All would be appropriate terms to describe Roger Ailes, the late media executive who founded and shepherded Fox News into the powerhouse it is today and sowed discord through his particularly vitriolic brand of right-wing conservatism. This film neither attempts to flatter his legacy or deny his great talent for capitalizing on the anxieties of his fellow man. Rather, the filmmakers try to get at the heart of who Ailes was through interviews with former colleagues and acquaintances, who shine a light on the ambitions that drove him to success, as well as the deficiencies that contributed to his downfall.

After touching on the sexual harassment scandal that precipitated Ailes being let go as chairman and CEO of Fox News, director Alexis Bloom goes back to his roots in Warren, Ohio, a small industrial city with so-called “traditional” American values, according to those who remember Ailes’s descriptions of it. There he suffered under a stern father who engendered a fear of unions and their potentially destabilizing ways and who was seemingly proven right when industrial and manufacturing jobs left Warren during the 1960s and ’70s. But Ailes was also diagnosed with hemophilia as a child, and all told felt that personal extinction was always a looming threat.

Amid these constant anxieties, he developed a gift for grasping the fears of others and manipulating them, which he would use to great effect as Richard Nixon’s media adviser during the presidential election of 1968, the recently deceased George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis, and countless smaller races in between for the Republican Party. Yet even in 1968, a relatively early point in his political career, he revealed a propensity to be amoral, as the inspiration for how he redefined Nixon for television was none other than Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), the seminal work of pro-Hitler propaganda.

Some of the more fascinating moments of the film involve juxtaposing footage of candidates pre- and post-Ailes, which highlights just how effective he was at harnessing the power of the relatively cutting-edge medium of television. In the end, it is difficult not to respect Ailes’s ability even if one finds him personally loathsome, especially since his tactics frequently involved fear-mongering. Yet there was something undeniably charismatic about him. He was apparently a tap dancer, and when Ailes’s career as a political kingmaker and television creative is on the upswing, Bloom employs a nimble tap dancing body double.

Similarly, when Ailes leaves former employer NBC to launch Fox News in 1996, his motivation is revenge, and we can appreciate the fire with which he goes about making good on this threat to “f*** his old bosses like they’ve never been f***ed,” even if in the process he systematically lowered the standards of American journalism. However, Bloom also does a thorough job laying out the case that Ailes was a serial sexual harasser, who was able to get away with it for years because of the toxic atmosphere of fear and intimidation he fostered.

Over the course of deconstructing her subject, the director utilizes voice-over narration based on books, such as his You Are the Message: Getting What You Want by Being Who You Are, to get inside his mind. As delivered by actor Peter Gerety, who makes Ailes sound cold and downright reptilian at times, the quotes betray a deep-rooted cynicism that his actions reflected. For example, according to former employees, what drove him was not idealism but getting the highest ratings possible, which often coincided with pandering to the lowest common denominator and peddling conspiracy theories (though apparently, Ailes really did believe the ones about Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as Barack Obama).

Divide and Conquer isn’t likely to make anybody change their mind about Ailes, and in fact, those who already found him reprehensible for what Fox News has done to politics may detest him even more. There are some attempts to draw parallels between him and Citizen Kane’s Charles Foster Kane, another wealthy media maverick who bore a childhood-based misery that would prevent him from being happy during his lifetime. Besides the fact that Kane was fictional, the major difference between them is that Ailes constantly punched down. Along with terrorizing his female staffers, his erstwhile neighbors from sleepy Cold Spring in upstate New York tell horror stories of how Ailes turned community members against one another in an attempt to establish himself as lord of the town. The way he waged war is eerily familiar: having bought up the local newspaper, he used it to spread stories decrying those he deemed his enemies.

Even if the film’s central figure is no hero, at least there are sympathetic figures in former Fox anchors Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly, who kick off Ailes’s long-awaited comeuppance. At this point, we know the stakes involved as the accused has already ruined the careers of plenty of women who rejected his advances. His fall is certainly satisfying to behold, but unfortunately, the film’s finale reminds us that the main subject’s ghost still haunts our country, even if the man himself shuffled off this mortal coil in 2017. It’s one of the few moments in which even Ailes’s biggest critics might find themselves envying him.