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Directed by Michael Mann
Starring Al Pacino, Russell Crowe, Christopher Plummer, Diane Venora
USA, 1999
Rated R (language)
IMBALANCE
There is not one shot in The Insider that is plain or clean. Dante Spinotti’s camera
keeps coming in and out of tight, hugging close-ups and operatic photographic sweeps;
it makes this very effective ‘moral-thriller’ seem like it can never get a sense of balance
or complete simplicity. Spinotti doesn’t paint the pretty pictures that cinematographers
of epic Zhivago-esque love stories get acclaim for- his work, while noticeable, only works
for the movie, while other cinematography jobs I’ve seen just try to bring sole glory to the
photographer. The Insider, which clocks in at a hefty two and a half hours, is a rich,
though conventional, study of distortion; psychological and public tricks and thievery;
and maybe even of terrorism. Michael Mann, a director known for his long, drawn-out
epics that occasionally turn out to be hot air, has made this sprawling, absorbing film
that is based on a true-but-distorted 1995 story about a tobacco company, one man
after an important story (Al Pacino) and one man trying to provide for his family while
keeping an important corporate secret (Russell Crowe), and CBS, who refused to air the
resulting interview with Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer).
The man with a secret is Jeffery Wigand, a researcher for the tobacco company Brown & Williamson. He has just been fired and is seen in super slo-mo as he exits the B&W building (the slow motion technique is used yet again at the very end when another man becomes unemployed). His daughter has asthma and his wife is in tears over his sudden unemployment. Wigand was given a severance package which would allow him to live quite comfortably for a number of months, but his peace is disturbed by a 60 Minutes producer, Pacino’s Lowell Bergman. Bergman is a determined investigative reporter who is passionately dedicated to his job and he pursues Jeffrey Wigand’s tobacco secret that Wigand refuses to disclose due to a confidentiality agreement and threats from B&W. Bergman, who has coerced millions of stories out of people for years, eventually coaxes Wigand into spilling the beans, telling him how important his secret is. All the while, B&W’s people are following and threatening Wigand, which may (or may not) act as an elaboration on the vague elements of terrorism that might have been established by having the film open with Mike Wallace interviewing an Iranian terrorist.
There is plenty of struggle that fills The Insider’s exhaustive length. Mann molds facts and thorough visual and emotional details into compelling melodrama about the tobacco industry, the restrictive and scared media, and the relationship between Bergman and Wigand- their wavering trust, their symbiosis, and the strange force of nature that allows a financially and emotionally plagued man like Wigand and a no-crap, persuading reporter like Bergman to coexist in this world. When Wigand agrees to do a 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace and go against his confidentiality agreement to bring the truth to the world, his life falls apart. His children are weeping and his wife doesn’t know whether to destroy her nerves by standing by her man, or to leave. While Lowell Bergman feels for and sympathizes with Wigand, he must get this important story told.
The Insider shifts focus in midstream from the flailing Jeffrey Wigand, who has by now lost his wife and kids and teaches chemistry in high school, onto Lowell Bergman, Mike Wallace, and CBS. The network is frightened to air the version of 60 Minutes that contains the interview. A Brown & Williamson lawsuit would most definitely ensue. What do you do when you have dragged a story out of a not-so-stable nice guy and you know it will change the world, but the nice guy is now leading a bitter, lowly, even more unstable life and CBS decides it is too risky to air the interview? How does Bergman break the news to Wigand?
Such moral dilemmas are upon the TV network and Lowell Bergman and they carry into the final hour. The Insider is a very good movie- it is exciting, beautifully shot in grainy glory, and emotionally engaging, yet its two and a half hours, which I lightly pounced on earlier, go by like three and a half, and the material that fills the running time is not always an entertainment success. The Insider also is not completely admirable, making Al Pacino’s Bergman the crusader-hero, abandoning Russell Crowe’s Wigand, listless in the dust, as if he had no part in bringing the important news to the public.
Al Pacino and Christopher Plummer are excellent as part of the intense world of the media, but it is Russell Crowe’s performance that stands out; it is an astonishing transformation from Crowe’s charismatic, L.A. Confidential self to a gray-haired man with poor communication skills who is at the end of his rope. Crowe creates an effective aura of complete confusion and sadness that is only heightened by the constant use of very tight close-ups of his despairing face and a multi-layered, string-laden, and haunting score by Pieter Bourke, Lisa Gerrard, and Graeme Revell (there always seems to be a specific, dangerous or solemn beat to The Insider’s scenes).
Roger Ebert, in his review of the film, pointed out the manipulation of the true facts in The Insider, which becomes rather ironic when one realizes that the movie itself is about the distortion of truth. Even more striking about his review, I think, was its ending, which read: "The Insider had a greater impact on me than All the President's Men, because you know what? Watergate didn't kill my parents. Cigarettes did." Such statements get to the very reason why films move us: because we can relate. The Insider portrays a world of sharks and a man who wants to do right but has his life eventually ruined by what he divulged about the tobacco industry. These are human truths and, while The Insider may not be too admirable because of its twisting of the facts of the 1995 story, these truths make it admirable enough for me.
By Andrew Chan
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