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'Tis
the season to toss aside what other people think of you, do what you feel,
and devil-may-care who gets hurt in the process. At least, that's what
the movies will tell you. The heroes onscreen this season (Lester
Birnam of "American Beauty", Tyler Durden and "Jack" of
"Fight Club", Craig and Lottie of "Being John Malkovich")
are not humble. They're not the kind of people to give up their own
dreams for the good of another. They're distinctly American--"I
have a right to appease my desires, and you better not get in my way."
The
Insider couldn't come at a better time. 1999 finally has a movie
where the heroes have bigger things on their minds than just making
themselves happy. And those heroes are Jeffrey Wigand, who gave the
press the evidence that Big Tobacco was intentionally making cigarettes
addictive, and Lowell Bergman, the producer with the guts to run the story.
After I caught
a screening, a friend of mine asked, "What on earth makes The
Insider interesting? What drew that powerful cast
to such a mundane,
already-worked-over subject." Good question. Haven't
we had enough Oliver-Stone-esque movies about conspiracies and corporate
dishonesty? It was in the newspapers just two years ago... why bother
re-living it in a movie?
But Michael
Mann's 157-minute Event Movie is much more than an exploration of a media
scandal. Mann found a story about a drama relevant to
all of us: Trust between friends during times of
hardship. This is a war
movie. The big strikes are lawsuits. The battlefields are men's
consciences. And the heroes are putting themselves on the front lines
for the sake of telling the truth. The casualties? Integrity and
reputation. Family. Lifestyle. Futures and dreams.
Some bicker
about this movie's adherence to historical detail, but since I can't ever
know what really happened I'm more concerned about storytelling. (see footnote*) In this telling of the story
Jeffrey Wigand is fired from his job as a scientist for Big Tobacco when he
refuses to participate in a cover-up of unethical practices. He walks
away from his job, hoping to put it behind him. But his conscience is
not silent, and he attempts to bring his story to the press. His former
employers are watching, and they mean to hold him accountable to a
confidentiality agreement. When slyly moves outside the territory of the
agreement, they get nasty. And dangerous.
It may be
glamour and glory that draws Lowell Bergman to Jeffrey Wigand's predicament
in the first place, but soon he learns there is a man and a heart at risk
here. Fortunately, Bergman is a man of some conscience, and he isn't
going to use Wigand as a source and then abandon him to his miserable
fate.
Bergman is
Wigand's hope of making something good out of a bad situation. And so
the two become friends as they prepare a story for Mike Wallace to run on
"60 Minutes". But when Big Tobacco threatens "60
Minutes", and it looks like Wigand is suffering for a lost cause,
Bergman digs in his heels and things get really interesting.
No actors
could have brought more passion to the lead roles of this film. Al
Pacino is at his very best as Bergman. He's remarkably restrained, but
when the CBS executives begin to cut ties to him and his efforts to expose
Big Tobacco's lies, he summons up that high-caliber rage that perhaps only
DeNiro could have matched. His energy is the adrenalin of the
movie. And Russell Crowe's turn as Jeffrey Wigand is the movie's sweat
and the blood. Crowe continues to outdo himself on screen. Hold this
performance up to his work in "L.A. Confidential", "Mystery,
Alaska", or "The Quick and the Dead", and you won't believe
it's the same man. Watching him here is like watching the wax melt on a
candle, as Wigand slowly crumbles under the pressure of his moral dilemmas.
He moves from being a suit to being a vulnerable, truamatized human being,
staring out at the ocean as though waiting for an answer from God.
In the heated
confrontations and in the explosive boardroom debates, Christopher Plummer
comes close to stealing the movie. Plummer's Mike Wallace is shown to
be a fearless investigative reporter, as unafraid to challenge a Middle
Eastern warlord during an interview as he is to stand up to his corporate
bosses and remind them that he's what brings them good ratings. All
three of these guys deserve Oscars when March gets here.
Michael Mann
knows the talent he's got in front of him. He employs the most daring
use of close-ups I've seen since the films of Krzystof Kieslowski. He
pans across the faces of these beleaguered warriors the way Spielberg's
camera takes in battlefields in "Saving Private Ryan".
Cinematographer Spinotti frequently guides the camera around the back of his
actor's heads, and then zooms in slowly to that place at the base of the
skull where tension collects. You get the feeling that all of these
suffering souls need a good neck massage to help relieve the stress.
By literally
looking over the shoulders of Wigand and Bergman, we are unable to escape
wondering what we would do if we were in their shoes. Would we
compromise? Would we shut up when threatened? Or would we put our
family members up to be sacrificed on the altar of truth, and watch as all
the sordid bits of our past brought out on the evening news in a smear campaign?
Mann alternates
pregnant pauses with sequences of swift exhilarating action. He makes a
legal deposition and a cel-phone conversation as intense as the brilliant
shootout he choreographed in his cops-and-robbers classic "Heat".
It made 2 ½ hours of hushed conversations feel like a 90-minute action
movie.
What a
moviegoing season it is! Such originality, and so many great performances!
But among such memorable films, we have one that excels beyond technique, and
that urges us on to more than just serving ourselves. "The
Insider" is a movie that's worth a whole eight dollars for a ticket.
I had read the papers. I knew the story. And this film
moved, exhausted, and inspired me. That's more than any about any other
film I've seen in the last six months.
Footnote:
*A recent New York Times article ran an update that claimed the
film's portrayal of Mike Wallace's involvement is fairly accurate, except at
one point in the film Wallace is goaded to make the right choice, where he
still claims he made the right choice to begin with.
Jeffrey's Rating:
A+
Click here for an
explanation of ratings.
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