MOVIES Jonathan Richards
NICOTINE FIX
THE INSIDER Directed by Michael Mann Screenplay by Mann & Eric Roth With Al Pacino, Russell Crowe Jean Cocteau PG-13 157 min
The opening of Michael Mann's gripping expose' "The Insider" has "60 Minutes" producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) driven blindfolded through Tehran to a meeting with a Hezbollah chief. When the interview is abruptly terminated, Bergman finds himself alone in the room, and he sweeps back the curtains to discover a view of the city from an office window high above it. A similar perspective will be repeated from the corporate offices of tobacco giant Brown & Williamson, and broadcast giant CBS. The implication is evident: it's all about money, folks, and the view from high floors is pretty much the same everywhere. The movie recounts a low moment in the image of CBS News. In 1995, "60 Minutes" yanked a Mike Wallace interview with tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), who had confirmed that tobacco CEOs perjured themselves before Congress in denying that nicotine was addictive, and that their companies knowingly spike the nicotine in cigarettes to boost the fix. The CBS brass pressured the news magazine show, fearful that Brown & Williamson would sue for billions claiming "tertious interference" (inducing Wigand to break his confidentiality agreement). The truth is irrelevant, says a network lawyer (Gina Gershon). "The truer the information, the greater the danger." And "60 Minutes" caved. Christopher Plummer captures Mike Wallace so unerringly with gestures, facial expressions and temperament that although the two men are hardly lookalikes, there are moments when Plummer morphs completely into the veteran newsman. Al Pacino stays in control and still sears the screen as producer Bergman, who established a bond with Wigand and drew him out for the story. And Russell Crowe, the Australian actor best known here for "L.A. Confidential", is superb as Wigand, the muffled powder keg whose slow fuse of temper and conscience is unerringly lit by the bullying tactics of his former employers. There's a fascinating correlation between the disparate characters of Bergman and Wigand. Wigand left a background in health companies for a high-salaried job with tobacco; Bergman departed the leftist magazine "Ramparts" for a career with ultra-establishment CBS. In Mann's treatment, both finish the movie with their lives in disarray but their values restored. Big Tobacco is the villain, but the unsettling moral cavity at the center is the buck-driven relativity of truth in the corporate news business. "The Insider" doesn't pretend to be a documentary. It's a movie in the great tradition of tear-the-lid-off-the-whole-stinking-mess cinema, with artful cinematography and a lush enhancing score. It's drawn from life, but events are shuffled, compressed, invented. Still much of it, according to insiders, is just the way it happened, and on screen the story carries the whiff of truth; if some of it has been knowingly spiked to increase its impact, that's only the delivery system, and it's effective as hell.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews