The Insider: 160 minutes
The first question to ask of a two and a half-plus hour movie is could it have been shorter and still achieved the same effect? With a Heat, yes; with The Insider, no. The next question then is was that effect worth two and a half-plus hours, which is a little trickier to answer, as you have to first establish what the movie was trying to do. The Insider pretends to make that part easy for us, though: just as the TV magazine newshow 60 Minutes exposes, say, the tobacco industry, so does director Michael Mann's The Insider pull the curtain back on 60 minutes. Which is to say if your infortainment fetish didn't get satiated during prime time, check out the local theatre. It's all on the big screen now, dramatized. With big name actors: Al Pacino as a convincing Lowell Bergman, 60 Minutes segment-producer; Christopher Plummer as an austere, unredoubtable Mike Wallace; Russell Crowe as "insider" Jeffrey Wigand, constantly breathing in big just to blow the whistle on the tobacco industry.
Too, though, The Insider's something of a fairy tale--the ultimate insider pairing up with the ultimate investigative journalist to fight tobacco, the ultimate big industry heavy. Rain Maker-Civil Action type stuff, just without the Grisham underdog element. 60 Minutes is 60 Minutes, after all. Their calls get returned. As for Bergman and Wigand, too, they're practically the same character: one clings to journalistic ethics in the face of everything, and the other is a steadfast scientific method man. And both want to right all the wrongs so obviously going on, no matter the havoc it wreaks on their personal lives. The first part of being a hero, after all, is cutting all your ties or having them cut for you. Watch all the Deathwishes for more like this.
Of course there are various obstacles in Wigand and Bergman's way, though, which gives us the dramatic structure of The Insider: first Wigand goes to bat for Bergman, then Bergman goes to bat for Wigand. The problem with all this, though, is that the in-house resistance Bergman has to eventually hurdle (CBS translated as 'Corporate BS,' as personified in Gina Gershon) is much more believable than the resistance Wigand has to deal with. Not that we don't all already 'know' that big tobacco wouldn't hesitate to threaten the life of a whistle blower. That can be assumed. It's the threats themselves which don't ring true, or, feel suspiciously as if they've been edited for TV, so to speak. Which is to say the names have been left intentionally vague in order to avoid any potential legal ramifications. Which is to say that The Insider feels as if it's falling prey to the same pressures that--in the movie--are trying to keep Wigand off-camera.
Yes, though, one objection to that would be that the parties intimidating Wigand and family were never formally revealed, indicted, whatever, meaning The Insider, like 60 Minutes, is being true to the facts. Which is fine, except that The Insider claims to be a 'dramatization.' And dramatizations are pretty much licensed to do whatever's necessary to make the facts narratively compelling. And there are times in The Insider when things simply aren't that compelling, when bladder issues become more important than what's going on on-screen. But so be it. Russell Crowe is excellent; Al Pacino is doing a lighter version of his Glengarry Glen Ross role. And nevermind that the big 'secret' the trailer uses to draw us into the theater is anticlimactic enough that Mann had to spill it early rather than string us along (which is some good foresight on his part). Is The Insider worth the two and half-plus hours it takes to get through it without a pause button, though? Yes, but only for that one "How about Mr. Wallace?" line, which we've already heard.
(c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones, http://www.cinemuck.com
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